Full Text of the Guardian Comment is Free piece from yesterday
Is it just a coincidence or was someone at the US state department indulging himself in a nerdish jape with the timing of the Annapolis peace conference this week? Thursday sees the 60th anniversary of UN Resolution 181, which divided Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. It was a bitterly contested vote, whose consequences have reverberated down the decades.
The resulting map broke many existing principles - not least of cartography. It produced a checkerboard state, without consulting the occupants directly. So, for example, the Jewish state held barely a majority of Jews and thus incorporated, presumably against their will, 400,000 Palestinian Arabs.
Jerusalem, in a decision worthy of the setting for Pontius Pilate's famous manual ablutions, was to belong to neither. It was to become a "corpus separatum" under UN direction - which is why today, except for a few banana republics, no country in the world, not even the US, will build an embassy there, or recognise it as Israel's capital, eternal or otherwise. Indeed, it is a telling argument against Palestinian claims to the city as its capital - but for obvious reasons it is not one that Israel and its supporters are likely to make.
The resolution passed in the general assembly, but in the modern age, any such crucial decision would now go to the security council, where the US can wield its veto. Indeed, Israel and the US now argue that general assembly resolutions are not binding. This is something of an anomaly for a state whose raison d'etre is based on historical claims, since if general assembly resolutions are not binding, then the creation of Israel as a Jewish state was not binding on the Arabs.
The resolution does in fact say that any breach by any party is a threat to peace and security to be dealt with by the security council - which is of course still "dealing" with it 60 years later.
On the contrary, of course, Palestine's supporters have somersaulted in the opposite direction and argue that general assembly resolutions are binding - but tend to overlook Resolution 181, which the Arab states in the UN at the time disregarded. It was certainly unjust in terms of self-determination, but legal.
David Ben-Gurion and Israel's founding fathers took a lot of flack from their diehard supporters for accepting partition but deflected it by pointing out quietly that they had no intention of restricting themselves to those boundaries - which in truth made little sense in any topographic, ethnographic or any manner. The partition would not be final, Ben-Gurion said, "not with regard to the regime, not with regard to borders and not with regard to international agreements."
While Resolution 181 may seem anachronistic, its drafters presciently realised the Heath Robinson/Rube Goldberg nature of the boundaries, and drew up plans for an economic and customs union with free transit, which would almost make a two-state solution feasible. It allowed people to reside in one state while holding citizenship of the other, which points to solutions to populations left behind any new boundaries established.
Maybe it is the time for Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas to draw a line on the road map between the initial resolution and the final status. He should apologise for the failure of the Arab states to accept Resolution 181 and its determination that there should be a Jewish state. But he should use the resolution's map as the starting point for negotiations to get back to the 1967 armistice line rather than start at the latter and negotiate backward to the separation wall.
For more comment on the Annapolis conference click here.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Monday, November 26, 2007
Annapolis - Sixty Years after
Happy Birthday Resolution 181 - which partitioned Palestine Sixty years ago!
Guardian Comment is Free Curtain-raiser for Annapolis
Guardian Comment is Free Curtain-raiser for Annapolis
Thursday, November 22, 2007
John Bolton's Bile Lies A-smouldering..full text
Comment is Free, Guardian
Reading John Bolton's account of his tenure as George Bush's ambassador to the United Nations,Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations
, there are times when you almost want to cheer him for his role as the little boy calling into question the emperor's new clothes.
His exasperation with the UN process that substitutes consensus or the unity of the security council for actual results will resonate with those who watched with horror Slobodan Milosevic's resolution-strewn trail to Srebrenica or, even now, Khartoum's juggling with resolutions and statements from atop a pile of corpses. He even, albeit briefly considering that he spent several years working on the issue, belabours the US and the UN for allowing Morocco to duck its promises and legal obligations to allow a referendum in western Sahara.
Similarly he takes to task "the EU's proclivity to avoid confronting and actually recognising problems," he says, and he does have a point, even if many observers would feel that one of the biggest problems it has been avoiding has been the unilateralist tendency of the US.
It would be refreshing for those Labour types fawning over the White House to read Bolton's scathing dismissal of the alleged special relationship. Indeed, if anything, he seems to have a visceral hatred of Brits, especially those who disagree with him, like the former UN ambassador Emyr Jones Parry, who makes him wonder how Britain won an empire but explains why it lost America, and indeed his successor John Sawers, but with special vitriol for Jack Straw and Mark Malloch Brown. He sneers: "Many Brits believed their role in life was to play Athens to America's Rome, lending us the benefit of their superior suaveness, and smoothing off our regrettable colonial rough edges." In fact, he is speaking about an older policy, in which British diplomats tried to bridge the gap between American unilateralism and the rest of the world. Blair's complete abdication of independent policy gets no thanks whatsoever.
And that of course reminds us that Bolton is not a presumptuously precocious little boy. He is a blustering boor with a chip on each shoulder, one on his own account as the working class kid made good, and the other for the conservatives who he thinks represent the real America, who have been thwarted by his lengthy list of liberal demons.
Indeed one senses a deep personal insecurity, since he frequently records words of polite praise, but never any of the numerous criticisms that he attracted. Since he lacked the diplomatic niceties himself, he fails to look beneath the surface of the pleasantries that the UN diplomatic corps used with him, although he seems to have the subliminal message from Jones Parry. Of course no one was going to tell the US representative at the UN that he was a blustering boor, whatever they said to each other.
Bolton is free with abuse for others, but he is surprisingly thin-skinned when it comes to criticism from others. Almost breathtakingly, he praises Terje Roed-Larsen of Norway for "a propensity for speaking his mind ... always a source of delight to me." Clearly, it was the Norwegian's slavish assent which delights the author, since similar outspokenness from the "petty bureaucrat", Malloch Brown, Kofi Annan and Bolton's numerous other hate figures sends him into petulant rage.
This is not mere xenophobia: his enemies begin at home, with the "eastern elitists", state department "careerists", the "High Minded", the "True Believers", the "EAPeasers" (state department East Asia and Pacific staffers) and eventually those whom the "Risen Bureaucrats" seduced - Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and, although he avoids direct criticism, George Bush.
Indeed, he claims that he left the UN not because of the poor prospects of Senate confirmation but because of the success of his internal hate list in suborning "real conservative" foreign policy, and this book is a lengthy Parthian shot at them all. His opposition to the EU and "EUroids" is rooted in his visceral dislike for what he sees as a social democratic counter to the United States, and thus a potential rival, and of course, the British and French and all the other pretentious Lilliputians who would tie down the American Gulliver with ropes of international laws and multilateral treaties.
This is an obsessive book packed with minutiae of bureaucratic feuds and internal crusades, and as such, in a strange way, provides valuable insight into how the US formulates its foreign policy and, one could almost say, consequently, the UN fails to implement effective policies.
But while he attacks the processes of the UN, he frankly claims that "consensus" was supposed to mean that the United States was satisfied. In his indignation he fails to acknowledge that the other 191 could also play and thus paralyse the decision-making process. With complete lack of self-awareness, he does not acknowledge the role of his undiplomatic unilateralism in antagonising opponents and frustrating the efforts of allies.
Above all, we should remember that while Bolton can be faulted for thinking that bullying and blustering produce dividends, he is not being innovative in the essence of American foreign policy. He strips the skin off the skull of much of American foreign policy since the end of the second world war, but in doing so does little to advance it. Compromise being excluded, so essentially is diplomacy or anything like normal alliances.
Bolton quite clearly does not share the neocon illusions of spreading democracy at the point of a bayonet. How foreigners suffer is no concern of his. But he is quite prepared to threaten and use force to advance what he sees as American national interests, as judged by himself and his conservative cohorts. In that sense it is refreshing. What you see is what you get. If the EU, the UK and others have interests, they should stand up for them, instead of deferring to a presumed automatic altruism on the part of Washington.
Reading John Bolton's account of his tenure as George Bush's ambassador to the United Nations,Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations
, there are times when you almost want to cheer him for his role as the little boy calling into question the emperor's new clothes.His exasperation with the UN process that substitutes consensus or the unity of the security council for actual results will resonate with those who watched with horror Slobodan Milosevic's resolution-strewn trail to Srebrenica or, even now, Khartoum's juggling with resolutions and statements from atop a pile of corpses. He even, albeit briefly considering that he spent several years working on the issue, belabours the US and the UN for allowing Morocco to duck its promises and legal obligations to allow a referendum in western Sahara.
Similarly he takes to task "the EU's proclivity to avoid confronting and actually recognising problems," he says, and he does have a point, even if many observers would feel that one of the biggest problems it has been avoiding has been the unilateralist tendency of the US.
It would be refreshing for those Labour types fawning over the White House to read Bolton's scathing dismissal of the alleged special relationship. Indeed, if anything, he seems to have a visceral hatred of Brits, especially those who disagree with him, like the former UN ambassador Emyr Jones Parry, who makes him wonder how Britain won an empire but explains why it lost America, and indeed his successor John Sawers, but with special vitriol for Jack Straw and Mark Malloch Brown. He sneers: "Many Brits believed their role in life was to play Athens to America's Rome, lending us the benefit of their superior suaveness, and smoothing off our regrettable colonial rough edges." In fact, he is speaking about an older policy, in which British diplomats tried to bridge the gap between American unilateralism and the rest of the world. Blair's complete abdication of independent policy gets no thanks whatsoever.
And that of course reminds us that Bolton is not a presumptuously precocious little boy. He is a blustering boor with a chip on each shoulder, one on his own account as the working class kid made good, and the other for the conservatives who he thinks represent the real America, who have been thwarted by his lengthy list of liberal demons.
Indeed one senses a deep personal insecurity, since he frequently records words of polite praise, but never any of the numerous criticisms that he attracted. Since he lacked the diplomatic niceties himself, he fails to look beneath the surface of the pleasantries that the UN diplomatic corps used with him, although he seems to have the subliminal message from Jones Parry. Of course no one was going to tell the US representative at the UN that he was a blustering boor, whatever they said to each other.
Bolton is free with abuse for others, but he is surprisingly thin-skinned when it comes to criticism from others. Almost breathtakingly, he praises Terje Roed-Larsen of Norway for "a propensity for speaking his mind ... always a source of delight to me." Clearly, it was the Norwegian's slavish assent which delights the author, since similar outspokenness from the "petty bureaucrat", Malloch Brown, Kofi Annan and Bolton's numerous other hate figures sends him into petulant rage.
This is not mere xenophobia: his enemies begin at home, with the "eastern elitists", state department "careerists", the "High Minded", the "True Believers", the "EAPeasers" (state department East Asia and Pacific staffers) and eventually those whom the "Risen Bureaucrats" seduced - Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and, although he avoids direct criticism, George Bush.
Indeed, he claims that he left the UN not because of the poor prospects of Senate confirmation but because of the success of his internal hate list in suborning "real conservative" foreign policy, and this book is a lengthy Parthian shot at them all. His opposition to the EU and "EUroids" is rooted in his visceral dislike for what he sees as a social democratic counter to the United States, and thus a potential rival, and of course, the British and French and all the other pretentious Lilliputians who would tie down the American Gulliver with ropes of international laws and multilateral treaties.
This is an obsessive book packed with minutiae of bureaucratic feuds and internal crusades, and as such, in a strange way, provides valuable insight into how the US formulates its foreign policy and, one could almost say, consequently, the UN fails to implement effective policies.
But while he attacks the processes of the UN, he frankly claims that "consensus" was supposed to mean that the United States was satisfied. In his indignation he fails to acknowledge that the other 191 could also play and thus paralyse the decision-making process. With complete lack of self-awareness, he does not acknowledge the role of his undiplomatic unilateralism in antagonising opponents and frustrating the efforts of allies.
Above all, we should remember that while Bolton can be faulted for thinking that bullying and blustering produce dividends, he is not being innovative in the essence of American foreign policy. He strips the skin off the skull of much of American foreign policy since the end of the second world war, but in doing so does little to advance it. Compromise being excluded, so essentially is diplomacy or anything like normal alliances.
Bolton quite clearly does not share the neocon illusions of spreading democracy at the point of a bayonet. How foreigners suffer is no concern of his. But he is quite prepared to threaten and use force to advance what he sees as American national interests, as judged by himself and his conservative cohorts. In that sense it is refreshing. What you see is what you get. If the EU, the UK and others have interests, they should stand up for them, instead of deferring to a presumed automatic altruism on the part of Washington.
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Hang Down Your Head George W Bush: full text
Full text from Guardian Comment is Free
"There is no conclusive evidence of the death penalty's deterrent value and that any miscarriage or failure of justice in the death penalty's implementation is irreversible and irreparable," declared the UN resolution passed in committee on Thursday, calling for a global moratorium on capital punishment.
There are many old and highly appropriate proverbs about the company you keep. The vote found the US spinning at the axle of the Axis of Executions, standing firmly alongside China, Iran, Pakistan, Sudan and Syria for the right to behead, stone, gas, fry, inject, hang or shoot grown human beings.
And one has to say that these countries put their fangs where their mouth is, since between them they carry out 90% of executions.
In a frenzied last minute attempt to amend the UN resolution to death, the US also supported attempts to insert amendments opposing abortion, "to take all necessary measures to protect the lives of unborn children."
Joining with several other hang 'em high countries in their deep concern for prenatal as opposed to post-natal life, the US envoy Joseph Rees sermonized that "countries that advocate for the abolition of the death penalty should be at least equally scrupulous in showing concern for innocent life."
Of course he unwittingly laid himself open to the reverse charge: that the Republicans who put their heart and soul into anti-abortion resolutions in the US should be at least equally concerned with the deaths of fully-grown humans in executions. It is interesting to contrast the shrill fidelity of some American Catholic bishops on the Pope's views on abortion to their almost complete silence about executions.
In Britain, there are politicians with excellent left-wing credentials who still share the Pope's right-to-life position, which is at least consistent in opposition to both the death penalty and abortion. However, while it is not easy to establish when human life begins in the womb, it is sadly easy to determine when it ends it the execution chamber.
But since these amendments were a cynical attempt to ambush and kill the death penalty resolution rather than protect the unborn, it will not help the Bush administration if ever any of them get to immigration control at the Pearly Gates.
Sadly, the abolition of the death penalty is not a popular issue, even in the UK, where many people support it in principle, even if they almost always oppose it in execution, as it were. In the US it is even foggier. I remember a nice, young, liberal audience opposing ethnic cleansing in the Balkans being quite upset when they discovered that the Hague tribunal had no death penalty.
The issue also gets confused with some on the left, who, for many years have fervently confused the issue of whether celebrity convict Mumia Abu-Jamal is innocent, which is debatable, with whether he should be executed. Guilty or not, he should not be.
And, for some reason opposing executions in the US is for some a separate issue from executions in say, Cuba. At least Venezuela is on the side of the civilised angels on this one and supports the resolution, along with most Latin American states, as indeed does the UK and the rest of the EU.
The UN vote, which will now almost certainly pass in the full general assembly and already has the support of the human rights committee, will also certainly provoke the American know-nothings into paroxysms of rage against UN bureaucrats interfering in their country. Of course it is no such thing. It is simply stating the global community's sense of what constitutes civilised behaviour. And if the US wants to join Iran, China, Sudan and Syria, it is its right to do so.
But perhaps American presidents should think twice before invoking international law and moral standards against other countries, such as Iran, Syria and Sudan, as an excuse for action.
"There is no conclusive evidence of the death penalty's deterrent value and that any miscarriage or failure of justice in the death penalty's implementation is irreversible and irreparable," declared the UN resolution passed in committee on Thursday, calling for a global moratorium on capital punishment.
There are many old and highly appropriate proverbs about the company you keep. The vote found the US spinning at the axle of the Axis of Executions, standing firmly alongside China, Iran, Pakistan, Sudan and Syria for the right to behead, stone, gas, fry, inject, hang or shoot grown human beings.
And one has to say that these countries put their fangs where their mouth is, since between them they carry out 90% of executions.
In a frenzied last minute attempt to amend the UN resolution to death, the US also supported attempts to insert amendments opposing abortion, "to take all necessary measures to protect the lives of unborn children."
Joining with several other hang 'em high countries in their deep concern for prenatal as opposed to post-natal life, the US envoy Joseph Rees sermonized that "countries that advocate for the abolition of the death penalty should be at least equally scrupulous in showing concern for innocent life."
Of course he unwittingly laid himself open to the reverse charge: that the Republicans who put their heart and soul into anti-abortion resolutions in the US should be at least equally concerned with the deaths of fully-grown humans in executions. It is interesting to contrast the shrill fidelity of some American Catholic bishops on the Pope's views on abortion to their almost complete silence about executions.
In Britain, there are politicians with excellent left-wing credentials who still share the Pope's right-to-life position, which is at least consistent in opposition to both the death penalty and abortion. However, while it is not easy to establish when human life begins in the womb, it is sadly easy to determine when it ends it the execution chamber.
But since these amendments were a cynical attempt to ambush and kill the death penalty resolution rather than protect the unborn, it will not help the Bush administration if ever any of them get to immigration control at the Pearly Gates.
Sadly, the abolition of the death penalty is not a popular issue, even in the UK, where many people support it in principle, even if they almost always oppose it in execution, as it were. In the US it is even foggier. I remember a nice, young, liberal audience opposing ethnic cleansing in the Balkans being quite upset when they discovered that the Hague tribunal had no death penalty.
The issue also gets confused with some on the left, who, for many years have fervently confused the issue of whether celebrity convict Mumia Abu-Jamal is innocent, which is debatable, with whether he should be executed. Guilty or not, he should not be.
And, for some reason opposing executions in the US is for some a separate issue from executions in say, Cuba. At least Venezuela is on the side of the civilised angels on this one and supports the resolution, along with most Latin American states, as indeed does the UK and the rest of the EU.
The UN vote, which will now almost certainly pass in the full general assembly and already has the support of the human rights committee, will also certainly provoke the American know-nothings into paroxysms of rage against UN bureaucrats interfering in their country. Of course it is no such thing. It is simply stating the global community's sense of what constitutes civilised behaviour. And if the US wants to join Iran, China, Sudan and Syria, it is its right to do so.
But perhaps American presidents should think twice before invoking international law and moral standards against other countries, such as Iran, Syria and Sudan, as an excuse for action.
Monday, November 19, 2007
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Swift-boating across the Atlantic: Full text
Swift-boating across the Atlantic
The smear campaign against Mark Malloch Brown owes its tactics to the American neoconservative movement
November 14, 2007 10:00 PM | Guardian CiF full text
If Gordon Brown wants to reassure British voters, and the world, that there is distance between himself and the pathological ideologues in Washington who dragged his predecessor down, he should stomp on any of his officials who are party to the smear campaign against Foreign Office minister Mark Malloch Brown, one of his more inspired appointments.
While at the United Nations, Malloch Brown provoked John Bolton, the US ambassador, into paroxysms of thin-skinned rage, by suggested that the Iraq war was a disaster and that the US had lost popularity. In a similar vein, when the swift-boating of Kofi Annan was under way, he mounted a vigorous defence of the UN against the neocon smear campaign initiated by Ahmed Chalabi when the UN refused to endorse his carpet-bagging rise to power in Baghdad. It is worth noting that far from being the epitome of anti-Americanism, he had earlier been attacked by third-worlders for being too accommodating to the Americans and too nice to the Israelis.
But then, so had Annan. But once he suggested that the war on Iraq was illegal and that the full scale assault on Fallujah was a mistake, that was it. For the American right, you are with them all the way or you are an enemy.
In the US, swift-boating is now a regular tactic emanating from the network of foundations and thinktanks endowed by deeply conservative family trusts, and they have been guaranteed amplification in the Rupert Murdoch media. The tactic is to invent a scandal against a liberal hate figure and run it round around until people think that with so much smoke there must be fire.
This swift boat raid against Malloch Brown began when the Spectator carried a cover article attacking him by Claudia Rosett, an employee of the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies, a neocon thinktank which is financed by an assortment of palaoeconservative family foundations. It is not too surprising that the attack was amplified by the Murdoch press and Labour Friends of Israel.
The substance of the accusation should be a source of pride for Labour: Bush's lame duck administration does not like Malloch Brown. With Democratic majorities in Congress likely to increase at the next election, and a likely Democratic victory in the White House riding on a tide of anti-Iraq war sentiment, that surely makes him an asset. Unless, of course, your idea of being pro-American is being pro-Bush 43.
But since the advance guard of the swift-boat armada has landed on British beaches, it is worth checking the provenance of Rosett and the FDD. Her obsession with the UN almost makes one wonder if a blue-helmeted peacekeeper jumped out of the woodshed and frightened her when she was younger. But above all, try to imagine a journalist employed by a neocon thinktank writing anything positive at all about the United Nations!
Certainly one would have a long and fruitless search for any articles from the FDD or Rosett on the one definite oil-for-food scandal, which is the over $10bn of the UN programme's surplus handed over to the American occupation forces for the development of Iraq, which has yet to be accounted for. Much of it ended up paying for the no-bid contracts of the company that the vice-president of the US formerly headed - but the stunning sound of silence from Rosett and her neocon comrades implies that a scandal is not a scandal unless you can tie it, no matter how exiguously, to a liberal or a UN official.
Rosett can draw a salary paid for by the endowments of some of most reactionary people on the planet, such as the Scaife foundations, but that is not a scandal, while the idea that Mark Malloch Brown, after working for many years abroad, is housed by HMG is insupportable - or that he paid rent to George Soros. One has to remember that for American conservatives, association with the UN or Soros is ipso facto criminal or unethical behaviour.
The well-financed FDD is the Project for the New American Century - a major cheerleader for the Iraq war - in another form. As its own website boasts, it is closely connected with the Iraqis around the Iraqi National Congress and Chalabi. Its board included Steve Forbes, Jack Kemp, Frank Lautenberg, Newt Gingrich and James Woolsey, not to mention Richard Perle, Charles Krauthammer and, until her death, Jeane Kirkpatrick. Kirkpatrick opposed US support for Britain in the Falklands war, but the Thatcherites at the Spectator seem more forgiving than their transatlantic peers.
Gordon, meet Brown. Shake hands in public and put down the slimers.
The smear campaign against Mark Malloch Brown owes its tactics to the American neoconservative movement
November 14, 2007 10:00 PM | Guardian CiF full text
If Gordon Brown wants to reassure British voters, and the world, that there is distance between himself and the pathological ideologues in Washington who dragged his predecessor down, he should stomp on any of his officials who are party to the smear campaign against Foreign Office minister Mark Malloch Brown, one of his more inspired appointments.
While at the United Nations, Malloch Brown provoked John Bolton, the US ambassador, into paroxysms of thin-skinned rage, by suggested that the Iraq war was a disaster and that the US had lost popularity. In a similar vein, when the swift-boating of Kofi Annan was under way, he mounted a vigorous defence of the UN against the neocon smear campaign initiated by Ahmed Chalabi when the UN refused to endorse his carpet-bagging rise to power in Baghdad. It is worth noting that far from being the epitome of anti-Americanism, he had earlier been attacked by third-worlders for being too accommodating to the Americans and too nice to the Israelis.
But then, so had Annan. But once he suggested that the war on Iraq was illegal and that the full scale assault on Fallujah was a mistake, that was it. For the American right, you are with them all the way or you are an enemy.
In the US, swift-boating is now a regular tactic emanating from the network of foundations and thinktanks endowed by deeply conservative family trusts, and they have been guaranteed amplification in the Rupert Murdoch media. The tactic is to invent a scandal against a liberal hate figure and run it round around until people think that with so much smoke there must be fire.
This swift boat raid against Malloch Brown began when the Spectator carried a cover article attacking him by Claudia Rosett, an employee of the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies, a neocon thinktank which is financed by an assortment of palaoeconservative family foundations. It is not too surprising that the attack was amplified by the Murdoch press and Labour Friends of Israel.
The substance of the accusation should be a source of pride for Labour: Bush's lame duck administration does not like Malloch Brown. With Democratic majorities in Congress likely to increase at the next election, and a likely Democratic victory in the White House riding on a tide of anti-Iraq war sentiment, that surely makes him an asset. Unless, of course, your idea of being pro-American is being pro-Bush 43.
But since the advance guard of the swift-boat armada has landed on British beaches, it is worth checking the provenance of Rosett and the FDD. Her obsession with the UN almost makes one wonder if a blue-helmeted peacekeeper jumped out of the woodshed and frightened her when she was younger. But above all, try to imagine a journalist employed by a neocon thinktank writing anything positive at all about the United Nations!
Certainly one would have a long and fruitless search for any articles from the FDD or Rosett on the one definite oil-for-food scandal, which is the over $10bn of the UN programme's surplus handed over to the American occupation forces for the development of Iraq, which has yet to be accounted for. Much of it ended up paying for the no-bid contracts of the company that the vice-president of the US formerly headed - but the stunning sound of silence from Rosett and her neocon comrades implies that a scandal is not a scandal unless you can tie it, no matter how exiguously, to a liberal or a UN official.
Rosett can draw a salary paid for by the endowments of some of most reactionary people on the planet, such as the Scaife foundations, but that is not a scandal, while the idea that Mark Malloch Brown, after working for many years abroad, is housed by HMG is insupportable - or that he paid rent to George Soros. One has to remember that for American conservatives, association with the UN or Soros is ipso facto criminal or unethical behaviour.
The well-financed FDD is the Project for the New American Century - a major cheerleader for the Iraq war - in another form. As its own website boasts, it is closely connected with the Iraqis around the Iraqi National Congress and Chalabi. Its board included Steve Forbes, Jack Kemp, Frank Lautenberg, Newt Gingrich and James Woolsey, not to mention Richard Perle, Charles Krauthammer and, until her death, Jeane Kirkpatrick. Kirkpatrick opposed US support for Britain in the Falklands war, but the Thatcherites at the Spectator seem more forgiving than their transatlantic peers.
Gordon, meet Brown. Shake hands in public and put down the slimers.
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Annapolis: full text "The Road Map's Dead-end"
The road map's dead-end
The Annapolis peace conference looming later this month will fail unless the Quartet powers finally screw up their map and get down to business
Ian Williams
November 12, 2007 6:30 PM | Printable version
Coming soon to a TV screen near you later this month is the latest global Origami challenge, also known as the Annapolis Middle East peace conference. There a piece of paper formerly known as the "road map", will be folded, torn and squeezed through yet more quantum-style dimensions in an attempt to prove it still has life.
In theoretical physics, superstring theorists posit up to eleven dimensions, most of them invisible. The road map, in contrast, has no less than fourteen strings that Ariel Sharon attached, all of which are invisible, or at least tacitly ignored by Britain and the "Quartet" of Russia, Europe, the UN and the US.
In reality, of course, it shows fewer vital signs than John Cleese's parrot or Ariel Sharon on life support.
Indeed, it is an easy feat to ignore Sharon's 14 "reservations" when almost the entire West ignores the separation wall that rather ostentatiously blocks off the road map, while defying a world court legal ruling against it. If these pillars of the international community actually noticed them in public, then they would be forced to admit that the Israeli government has been driving way off the direction indicated by the road map, and perhaps do something about it: like refusing the Israeli recalcitrants diplomatic, military and financial support.
Indeed, taken together, the Sharon reservations make it plain that Native American reservation status would almost be an advance for the Palestinians, compared with the Bantustans that the Israeli government has been preparing for.
Sharon, when he withdrew from Gaza, explained that the purpose was to consolidate Israel's hold on the West Bank settlements, and the government put water, electricity, roads, police and army guards into the expanding settlements even as he solemnly promised to observe the road map prohibitions against expanding them. But somehow it was considered rude to listen in on a not-so private conversation between the butcher of Sabra and Shatila and his electorate.
The EU, which is Israel's biggest trading partner, would be forced to slap on some tariffs until Israel fulfilled its promises and obligations under its agreements. The UN may notice that Israel is defiant of a string of UN resolutions, which were at the time supported by the US and UK as well as the other members.
The only viable two state solution is one that, firstly secures the consent of Hamas the large proportion, perhaps the majority of the Palestinians, that it represents. That really depends on how close the negotiations get to the Saudi plan, which is essentially for Israeli acceptance of the UN resolutions, particularly those on the withdrawal from occupied territories (which includes of course, as the Syrians point out, the Golan Heights.)
The problem with that is, of course, that three years ago George Bush abrogated international law and almost 40 years of American foreign policy by declaring that because of "new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it [was] unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949." In other words, if a thief hangs on to the property long enough, he gains title. It is an interesting, but not persuasive, gloss on international law.
This is not like the squatter who asserts title by occupying property unchallenged for seven years. This occupation has been challenged consistently from the beginning.
The latest indication that the success of the conference depends on the Palestinians giving up all their legal rights under American and Israeli pressure is the report of Israeli dissatisfaction with the Palestinians' negotiations support unit, which was a result of Robin Cook's time in the Foreign Office. The team, paid for by Britain and others, is preparing the legal brief and senior Israeli officials say the unit is "increasingly becoming an obstacle with regard to progress after the Annapolis conference".
In other words, it will not do what it is told.
There are some signs that Condoleezza Rice at least recognizes that Israel's best interests are served by forgetting the dead-end road map and negotiating on the basis of the Saudi peace plan and the UN resolutions. One can hope that the US will provide the stick as well as the carrot to the Israeli donkey. But you would really need a faith-based belief in miracles.
The Annapolis peace conference looming later this month will fail unless the Quartet powers finally screw up their map and get down to business
Ian Williams
November 12, 2007 6:30 PM | Printable version
Coming soon to a TV screen near you later this month is the latest global Origami challenge, also known as the Annapolis Middle East peace conference. There a piece of paper formerly known as the "road map", will be folded, torn and squeezed through yet more quantum-style dimensions in an attempt to prove it still has life.
In theoretical physics, superstring theorists posit up to eleven dimensions, most of them invisible. The road map, in contrast, has no less than fourteen strings that Ariel Sharon attached, all of which are invisible, or at least tacitly ignored by Britain and the "Quartet" of Russia, Europe, the UN and the US.
In reality, of course, it shows fewer vital signs than John Cleese's parrot or Ariel Sharon on life support.
Indeed, it is an easy feat to ignore Sharon's 14 "reservations" when almost the entire West ignores the separation wall that rather ostentatiously blocks off the road map, while defying a world court legal ruling against it. If these pillars of the international community actually noticed them in public, then they would be forced to admit that the Israeli government has been driving way off the direction indicated by the road map, and perhaps do something about it: like refusing the Israeli recalcitrants diplomatic, military and financial support.
Indeed, taken together, the Sharon reservations make it plain that Native American reservation status would almost be an advance for the Palestinians, compared with the Bantustans that the Israeli government has been preparing for.
Sharon, when he withdrew from Gaza, explained that the purpose was to consolidate Israel's hold on the West Bank settlements, and the government put water, electricity, roads, police and army guards into the expanding settlements even as he solemnly promised to observe the road map prohibitions against expanding them. But somehow it was considered rude to listen in on a not-so private conversation between the butcher of Sabra and Shatila and his electorate.
The EU, which is Israel's biggest trading partner, would be forced to slap on some tariffs until Israel fulfilled its promises and obligations under its agreements. The UN may notice that Israel is defiant of a string of UN resolutions, which were at the time supported by the US and UK as well as the other members.
The only viable two state solution is one that, firstly secures the consent of Hamas the large proportion, perhaps the majority of the Palestinians, that it represents. That really depends on how close the negotiations get to the Saudi plan, which is essentially for Israeli acceptance of the UN resolutions, particularly those on the withdrawal from occupied territories (which includes of course, as the Syrians point out, the Golan Heights.)
The problem with that is, of course, that three years ago George Bush abrogated international law and almost 40 years of American foreign policy by declaring that because of "new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it [was] unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949." In other words, if a thief hangs on to the property long enough, he gains title. It is an interesting, but not persuasive, gloss on international law.
This is not like the squatter who asserts title by occupying property unchallenged for seven years. This occupation has been challenged consistently from the beginning.
The latest indication that the success of the conference depends on the Palestinians giving up all their legal rights under American and Israeli pressure is the report of Israeli dissatisfaction with the Palestinians' negotiations support unit, which was a result of Robin Cook's time in the Foreign Office. The team, paid for by Britain and others, is preparing the legal brief and senior Israeli officials say the unit is "increasingly becoming an obstacle with regard to progress after the Annapolis conference".
In other words, it will not do what it is told.
There are some signs that Condoleezza Rice at least recognizes that Israel's best interests are served by forgetting the dead-end road map and negotiating on the basis of the Saudi peace plan and the UN resolutions. One can hope that the US will provide the stick as well as the carrot to the Israeli donkey. But you would really need a faith-based belief in miracles.
Throwing the brown stuff at Malloch Brown
For hauntings, you call ghostbusters, for Neocon infestations, you call Deadlinepundit. Claudia Rosett, an employee of the home thingtank of the Necons, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which is turn financed by an assortment of palaoeconservative family foundations, has emerged in Britain, in the Conservative "Spectator" as part of a plot against Mark Malloch Brown, joined it would appear by Neo-con andd Likudnik infiltrators into the Labour Party.
I hope Brown supports Malloch Brown publically and sends these sinister haunts back to their lairs!
Here's my Nation piece on it.
The Nation, December 22 2004
The Right's Assault on Kofi Annan
Ian Williams
The story of how the neocon echo chamber made oil for food into a UN scandal begins with Claudia Rosett, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who is now "journalist in residence" at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD). In a 2002 Journal op-ed, just after Bush broke with his own hard-liners by going to the UN to ask for backing for an Iraq invasion, she called the program "an unholy union between Saddam and the U.N.," in which "Saddam has been getting around the sanctions via surcharge-kickback deals and smuggling." In an April 2003 New York Times piece she said "lifting the sanctions would take away the United Nations' remaining leverage in Iraq. If the oil-for-food operation is extended, however, it will have a tremendous influence on shaping the new Iraq. Before that is allowed to happen, let's see the books." Denying that the foundation, or for that matter Chalabi, set her on her quest, Rosett says she began looking at the program as part of a broader look at the Iraq economy, and that as soon as its structure was explained to her, "it was obvious that there was enormous opportunity there for graft."
The idea that the UN has "failed" by not backing the US invasion of Iraq and that everything Saddam did could be laid at its door was very much part of the house philosophy of FDD, whose masthead is a comprehensive list of those who pushed for the invasion of Iraq. The organization itself, as one observer commented, is the Project for the New American Century--the major cheerleader for the Iraq war--in another form. Its board includes Steve Forbes, Jack Kemp, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Frank Lautenberg, Newt Gingrich and James Woolsey, not to mention Richard Perle and Charles Krauthammer. Tom Barry, policy director of the International Relations Center and historian of the neocon network, says FDD "has suddenly become a major player on the right and among neocon policy institutes, one reason being that it is so richly endowed." As its own website boasts, it is closely connected with the Iraqis around the Iraqi National Congress and Chalabi.
Clifford May, FDD president and former RNC spokesman, is eager to admit that "oil for food is something we have been working hard on" but denies "that either Claudia or I have called for [Annan's] resignation." That's not because May admires the UN; he calls it "an institution badly in need of reform, whether it's for the sex scandals in the Congo or for the pretense some people in it have to become a super government for the world, or a world Supreme Court." Asked her opinion about the use others have made of her work, Rosett says, "I have focused on reporting the story, and where I have so far called for changes at the UN, have urged much greater transparency and accountability."
CONTINUED BELOW
There is indeed a lack of transparency at the UN, but all those contracts were examined by the sanctions committee and the US State Department. Rosett denies "going after" the UN and says that "whatever was done wrong should be brought to light." But she is adamant that the UN is most at fault and she has neglected to give similar attention to US diplomats and other actors.
In subsequent articles Rosett maintained the pressure, but the issue really only exploded into the wider media world in 2004, after her revelations last March in National Review that Annan's son had been employed by Cotecna (followed several months later with the news that he had continued to get "noncompete" payments after he left). From January onward, the claims by Washington's then-favorite Iraqi, Chalabi, that retiring oil-for-food chief Sevan was on a list of 267 people for whom Saddam had authorized commissions on oil trades led to a rash of stories by Rosett and others focusing, as Chalabi had, on the one alleged UN connection.
When asked about Sevan in the Senate, Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group, admitted that his only evidence against Sevan was "what was indicated in Iraqi documents"--i.e., Chalabi's list--which has still not been authenticated. Indeed, another person named on the list was George Galloway, a British MP who has just won a $290,000 libel claim against the Daily Telegraph for its unwarranted inferences from that fact.
Rosett and her colleagues ran hot with the story, not least on MSNBC and Fox, which retained her as a paid "oil-for-food" contributor. Soon the scandal was "the biggest in the history of the Universe," according to her FDD colleague and Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer. William Safire picked up on Rosett's work and fulminated in the New York Times, drawing in House International Relations Committee chair Henry Hyde, who's since been on the case with all the assiduity one would expect of someone who'd said the United States should leave the UN.
Monica Crowley, hosting Scarborough Country on MSNBC in November, inadvertently substantiated the Star Tribune's claim of a "right-wing constellation." She complained that the "elite" press was ignoring the oil-for-food story, "with the exception of an intrepid reporter like our friend Claudia Rosett.... Bill Safire over at the New York Times, sort of the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal and the New York Sun, they have been covering it. But why haven't we seen more extensive coverage? This is the world's biggest swindle?" She modestly omitted MSNBC, Fox and the conservative radio circuit from the list.
The story of how the neocon echo chamber made oil for food into a UN scandal begins with Claudia Rosett, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who is now "journalist in residence" at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD). In a 2002 Journal op-ed, just after Bush broke with his own hard-liners by going to the UN to ask for backing for an Iraq invasion, she called the program "an unholy union between Saddam and the U.N.," in which "Saddam has been getting around the sanctions via surcharge-kickback deals and smuggling." In an April 2003 New York Times piece she said "lifting the sanctions would take away the United Nations' remaining leverage in Iraq. If the oil-for-food operation is extended, however, it will have a tremendous influence on shaping the new Iraq. Before that is allowed to happen, let's see the books." Denying that the foundation, or for that matter Chalabi, set her on her quest, Rosett says she began looking at the program as part of a broader look at the Iraq economy, and that as soon as its structure was explained to her, "it was obvious that there was enormous opportunity there for graft."
The idea that the UN has "failed" by not backing the US invasion of Iraq and that everything Saddam did could be laid at its door was very much part of the house philosophy of FDD, whose masthead is a comprehensive list of those who pushed for the invasion of Iraq. The organization itself, as one observer commented, is the Project for the New American Century--the major cheerleader for the Iraq war--in another form. Its board includes Steve Forbes, Jack Kemp, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Frank Lautenberg, Newt Gingrich and James Woolsey, not to mention Richard Perle and Charles Krauthammer. Tom Barry, policy director of the International Relations Center and historian of the neocon network, says FDD "has suddenly become a major player on the right and among neocon policy institutes, one reason being that it is so richly endowed." As its own website boasts, it is closely connected with the Iraqis around the Iraqi National Congress and Chalabi.
Clifford May, FDD president and former RNC spokesman, is eager to admit that "oil for food is something we have been working hard on" but denies "that either Claudia or I have called for [Annan's] resignation." That's not because May admires the UN; he calls it "an institution badly in need of reform, whether it's for the sex scandals in the Congo or for the pretense some people in it have to become a super government for the world, or a world Supreme Court." Asked her opinion about the use others have made of her work, Rosett says, "I have focused on reporting the story, and where I have so far called for changes at the UN, have urged much greater transparency and accountability."
There is indeed a lack of transparency at the UN, but all those contracts were examined by the sanctions committee and the US State Department. Rosett denies "going after" the UN and says that "whatever was done wrong should be brought to light." But she is adamant that the UN is most at fault and she has neglected to give similar attention to US diplomats and other actors.
In subsequent articles Rosett maintained the pressure, but the issue really only exploded into the wider media world in 2004, after her revelations last March in National Review that Annan's son had been employed by Cotecna (followed several months later with the news that he had continued to get "noncompete" payments after he left). From January onward, the claims by Washington's then-favorite Iraqi, Chalabi, that retiring oil-for-food chief Sevan was on a list of 267 people for whom Saddam had authorized commissions on oil trades led to a rash of stories by Rosett and others focusing, as Chalabi had, on the one alleged UN connection.
When asked about Sevan in the Senate, Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group, admitted that his only evidence against Sevan was "what was indicated in Iraqi documents"--i.e., Chalabi's list--which has still not been authenticated. Indeed, another person named on the list was George Galloway, a British MP who has just won a $290,000 libel claim against the Daily Telegraph for its unwarranted inferences from that fact.
Rosett and her colleagues ran hot with the story, not least on MSNBC and Fox, which retained her as a paid "oil-for-food" contributor. Soon the scandal was "the biggest in the history of the Universe," according to her FDD colleague and Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer. William Safire picked up on Rosett's work and fulminated in the New York Times, drawing in House International Relations Committee chair Henry Hyde, who's since been on the case with all the assiduity one would expect of someone who'd said the United States should leave the UN.
Monica Crowley, hosting Scarborough Country on MSNBC in November, inadvertently substantiated the Star Tribune's claim of a "right-wing constellation." She complained that the "elite" press was ignoring the oil-for-food story, "with the exception of an intrepid reporter like our friend Claudia Rosett.... Bill Safire over at the New York Times, sort of the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal and the New York Sun, they have been covering it. But why haven't we seen more extensive coverage? This is the world's biggest swindle?" She modestly omitted MSNBC, Fox and the conservative radio circuit from the list.
Like the Swift Boat story, even though the fuss was essentially confined to these outlets, the conservatives made so much of the affair that the rest of the media seem to have concluded that there must be a flicker under all the smoke. Certainly the serious papers seem not to have thought they had a dog in this fight or that it was their job to exonerate the UN. And the UN's own response was, as usual, tepid.
Understandably, Annan had assumed that his appointment in April of former US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker to head an inquiry, backed by the Security Council, would see a return to sanity. However, the same people who'd demanded the inquiry then began to accuse Annan of underfunding it. When he found $30 million for it from residual oil-for-food funds set aside for administration purposes, Rosett, Safire and the rest accused him of taking bread from Iraqi children's mouths. The New York Post denounced the investigation as a cover-up, while Safire referred insultingly to Annan's "manipulative abuse of Paul Volcker," whose reputation for integrity, he said, "is being shredded by a web of sticky-fingered officials and see-no-evil bureaucrats desperate to protect the man on top who hired him to substitute for--and thereby to abort--prompt and truly independent investigation."
The witch hunters kept the caldron bubbling along until, at the end of October, Annan wrote a private letter to Iraqi Interim President Iyad Allawi, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bush, suggesting that a frontal assault on Falluja was not the way to win Iraqi hearts and minds. After all, at the request of Washington, the UN is supposed to be overseeing elections there. Then the pot bubbled over. Within days, Fox's Bill O'Reilly was pontificating that "it's becoming increasingly clear that UN chief Kofi Annan is hurting the USA." On November 18 former New York Mayor Edward Koch followed with a column in the New York Sun claiming that Annan's "ability to lead the UN is seriously impaired. He no longer has the confidence of America because of his failure to create a consensus on Iraq among the permanent members." On November 24 National Review declared that "Annan should either resign, if he is honorable, or be removed, if he is not." This was echoed on November 29 by Safire, who ended a New York Times column with the comment that the "scandal" would not end "until Kofi Annan, even if personally innocent, resigns--having, through initial ineptitude and final obstructionism, brought dishonor on the Secretariat of the United Nations." Finally, on December 1 in the Wall Street Journal, Norm Coleman, the chair of the Senate investigations committee, called for Annan's resignation. Inspired by his example, Representative Scott Garrett raved a few days later, "To me the question should not be whether Kofi Annan should be in charge. To me, the larger question is whether he should be in jail."
When asked, President Bush pointedly did not repudiate Coleman's call with any expression of confidence in Annan but simply called for the investigation to take its course. A week later, after Blair had joined the rest of the world in expressing warm support for Annan and delegates in the General Assembly had given him a standing ovation, even the White House realized the damage Coleman & Co. had done to American diplomacy.
The best that Bush could manage was to have his lame-duck UN ambassador, John Danforth, give a halfhearted expression of support on his behalf. An unabashed Coleman read between the lines and held his ground: "I simply do not share the Administration's position on this matter," he said. "It is my personal and steadfast belief that Mr. Annan should step down in order to protect the long-term integrity and credibility of the United Nations."
The attacks on Annan and the UN are not likely to abate soon. Bashing the UN is an issue that allows the unilateral interventionists to ring the till, gathering support from paleocon isolationists across the country. As one GOP staffer embarrassed by Coleman's Joe McCarthy imitations gloomily predicted, the right wing is not going to drop the subject, because "they raise too much money out of bashing the UN, from the big foundations and from those small-town Rush Limbaughs."
Former Gore 2000 campaign head Donna Brazile, who says she is reconsidering her affiliation with the FDD, denounced the calls for Annan's resignation before the investigation is finished. "I worked on Capitol Hill before Kofi Annan, and the UN has always been a dirty word there," Brazile noted. "It just goes back to the neocons and their entire approach to multilateral institutions and their role in the world. They've got the airwaves to themselves. I just hope the Democrats stand up against them on this issue."
If the Democrats want to do that, they should begin by distancing themselves from the Democratic Leadership Council's shameful call for Annan's resignation and join those who signed Representative Dennis Kucinich's letter deploring the attacks. And they should join Representative Henry Waxman in demanding that the Governmental Reform Committee investigate the real oil-for-food scandal: what happened to the more than $8 billion unspent from the oil-for-food program that the United States insisted be handed over to the "Iraq Development Fund," overseen by US occupation authority head Paul Bremer. The rest of the Security Council reluctantly agreed to this payment, but only on condition that the fund be monitored by international auditors. The auditors were never allowed to do their work, and it is now suspected that most of that money went to Halliburton on no-bid contracts. Now there are grounds for some resignations. But you know who won't be calling for them.
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I hope Brown supports Malloch Brown publically and sends these sinister haunts back to their lairs!
Here's my Nation piece on it.
The Nation, December 22 2004
The Right's Assault on Kofi Annan
Ian Williams
The story of how the neocon echo chamber made oil for food into a UN scandal begins with Claudia Rosett, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who is now "journalist in residence" at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD). In a 2002 Journal op-ed, just after Bush broke with his own hard-liners by going to the UN to ask for backing for an Iraq invasion, she called the program "an unholy union between Saddam and the U.N.," in which "Saddam has been getting around the sanctions via surcharge-kickback deals and smuggling." In an April 2003 New York Times piece she said "lifting the sanctions would take away the United Nations' remaining leverage in Iraq. If the oil-for-food operation is extended, however, it will have a tremendous influence on shaping the new Iraq. Before that is allowed to happen, let's see the books." Denying that the foundation, or for that matter Chalabi, set her on her quest, Rosett says she began looking at the program as part of a broader look at the Iraq economy, and that as soon as its structure was explained to her, "it was obvious that there was enormous opportunity there for graft."
The idea that the UN has "failed" by not backing the US invasion of Iraq and that everything Saddam did could be laid at its door was very much part of the house philosophy of FDD, whose masthead is a comprehensive list of those who pushed for the invasion of Iraq. The organization itself, as one observer commented, is the Project for the New American Century--the major cheerleader for the Iraq war--in another form. Its board includes Steve Forbes, Jack Kemp, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Frank Lautenberg, Newt Gingrich and James Woolsey, not to mention Richard Perle and Charles Krauthammer. Tom Barry, policy director of the International Relations Center and historian of the neocon network, says FDD "has suddenly become a major player on the right and among neocon policy institutes, one reason being that it is so richly endowed." As its own website boasts, it is closely connected with the Iraqis around the Iraqi National Congress and Chalabi.
Clifford May, FDD president and former RNC spokesman, is eager to admit that "oil for food is something we have been working hard on" but denies "that either Claudia or I have called for [Annan's] resignation." That's not because May admires the UN; he calls it "an institution badly in need of reform, whether it's for the sex scandals in the Congo or for the pretense some people in it have to become a super government for the world, or a world Supreme Court." Asked her opinion about the use others have made of her work, Rosett says, "I have focused on reporting the story, and where I have so far called for changes at the UN, have urged much greater transparency and accountability."
CONTINUED BELOW
There is indeed a lack of transparency at the UN, but all those contracts were examined by the sanctions committee and the US State Department. Rosett denies "going after" the UN and says that "whatever was done wrong should be brought to light." But she is adamant that the UN is most at fault and she has neglected to give similar attention to US diplomats and other actors.
In subsequent articles Rosett maintained the pressure, but the issue really only exploded into the wider media world in 2004, after her revelations last March in National Review that Annan's son had been employed by Cotecna (followed several months later with the news that he had continued to get "noncompete" payments after he left). From January onward, the claims by Washington's then-favorite Iraqi, Chalabi, that retiring oil-for-food chief Sevan was on a list of 267 people for whom Saddam had authorized commissions on oil trades led to a rash of stories by Rosett and others focusing, as Chalabi had, on the one alleged UN connection.
When asked about Sevan in the Senate, Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group, admitted that his only evidence against Sevan was "what was indicated in Iraqi documents"--i.e., Chalabi's list--which has still not been authenticated. Indeed, another person named on the list was George Galloway, a British MP who has just won a $290,000 libel claim against the Daily Telegraph for its unwarranted inferences from that fact.
Rosett and her colleagues ran hot with the story, not least on MSNBC and Fox, which retained her as a paid "oil-for-food" contributor. Soon the scandal was "the biggest in the history of the Universe," according to her FDD colleague and Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer. William Safire picked up on Rosett's work and fulminated in the New York Times, drawing in House International Relations Committee chair Henry Hyde, who's since been on the case with all the assiduity one would expect of someone who'd said the United States should leave the UN.
Monica Crowley, hosting Scarborough Country on MSNBC in November, inadvertently substantiated the Star Tribune's claim of a "right-wing constellation." She complained that the "elite" press was ignoring the oil-for-food story, "with the exception of an intrepid reporter like our friend Claudia Rosett.... Bill Safire over at the New York Times, sort of the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal and the New York Sun, they have been covering it. But why haven't we seen more extensive coverage? This is the world's biggest swindle?" She modestly omitted MSNBC, Fox and the conservative radio circuit from the list.
The story of how the neocon echo chamber made oil for food into a UN scandal begins with Claudia Rosett, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who is now "journalist in residence" at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD). In a 2002 Journal op-ed, just after Bush broke with his own hard-liners by going to the UN to ask for backing for an Iraq invasion, she called the program "an unholy union between Saddam and the U.N.," in which "Saddam has been getting around the sanctions via surcharge-kickback deals and smuggling." In an April 2003 New York Times piece she said "lifting the sanctions would take away the United Nations' remaining leverage in Iraq. If the oil-for-food operation is extended, however, it will have a tremendous influence on shaping the new Iraq. Before that is allowed to happen, let's see the books." Denying that the foundation, or for that matter Chalabi, set her on her quest, Rosett says she began looking at the program as part of a broader look at the Iraq economy, and that as soon as its structure was explained to her, "it was obvious that there was enormous opportunity there for graft."
The idea that the UN has "failed" by not backing the US invasion of Iraq and that everything Saddam did could be laid at its door was very much part of the house philosophy of FDD, whose masthead is a comprehensive list of those who pushed for the invasion of Iraq. The organization itself, as one observer commented, is the Project for the New American Century--the major cheerleader for the Iraq war--in another form. Its board includes Steve Forbes, Jack Kemp, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Frank Lautenberg, Newt Gingrich and James Woolsey, not to mention Richard Perle and Charles Krauthammer. Tom Barry, policy director of the International Relations Center and historian of the neocon network, says FDD "has suddenly become a major player on the right and among neocon policy institutes, one reason being that it is so richly endowed." As its own website boasts, it is closely connected with the Iraqis around the Iraqi National Congress and Chalabi.
Clifford May, FDD president and former RNC spokesman, is eager to admit that "oil for food is something we have been working hard on" but denies "that either Claudia or I have called for [Annan's] resignation." That's not because May admires the UN; he calls it "an institution badly in need of reform, whether it's for the sex scandals in the Congo or for the pretense some people in it have to become a super government for the world, or a world Supreme Court." Asked her opinion about the use others have made of her work, Rosett says, "I have focused on reporting the story, and where I have so far called for changes at the UN, have urged much greater transparency and accountability."
There is indeed a lack of transparency at the UN, but all those contracts were examined by the sanctions committee and the US State Department. Rosett denies "going after" the UN and says that "whatever was done wrong should be brought to light." But she is adamant that the UN is most at fault and she has neglected to give similar attention to US diplomats and other actors.
In subsequent articles Rosett maintained the pressure, but the issue really only exploded into the wider media world in 2004, after her revelations last March in National Review that Annan's son had been employed by Cotecna (followed several months later with the news that he had continued to get "noncompete" payments after he left). From January onward, the claims by Washington's then-favorite Iraqi, Chalabi, that retiring oil-for-food chief Sevan was on a list of 267 people for whom Saddam had authorized commissions on oil trades led to a rash of stories by Rosett and others focusing, as Chalabi had, on the one alleged UN connection.
When asked about Sevan in the Senate, Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group, admitted that his only evidence against Sevan was "what was indicated in Iraqi documents"--i.e., Chalabi's list--which has still not been authenticated. Indeed, another person named on the list was George Galloway, a British MP who has just won a $290,000 libel claim against the Daily Telegraph for its unwarranted inferences from that fact.
Rosett and her colleagues ran hot with the story, not least on MSNBC and Fox, which retained her as a paid "oil-for-food" contributor. Soon the scandal was "the biggest in the history of the Universe," according to her FDD colleague and Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer. William Safire picked up on Rosett's work and fulminated in the New York Times, drawing in House International Relations Committee chair Henry Hyde, who's since been on the case with all the assiduity one would expect of someone who'd said the United States should leave the UN.
Monica Crowley, hosting Scarborough Country on MSNBC in November, inadvertently substantiated the Star Tribune's claim of a "right-wing constellation." She complained that the "elite" press was ignoring the oil-for-food story, "with the exception of an intrepid reporter like our friend Claudia Rosett.... Bill Safire over at the New York Times, sort of the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal and the New York Sun, they have been covering it. But why haven't we seen more extensive coverage? This is the world's biggest swindle?" She modestly omitted MSNBC, Fox and the conservative radio circuit from the list.
Like the Swift Boat story, even though the fuss was essentially confined to these outlets, the conservatives made so much of the affair that the rest of the media seem to have concluded that there must be a flicker under all the smoke. Certainly the serious papers seem not to have thought they had a dog in this fight or that it was their job to exonerate the UN. And the UN's own response was, as usual, tepid.
Understandably, Annan had assumed that his appointment in April of former US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker to head an inquiry, backed by the Security Council, would see a return to sanity. However, the same people who'd demanded the inquiry then began to accuse Annan of underfunding it. When he found $30 million for it from residual oil-for-food funds set aside for administration purposes, Rosett, Safire and the rest accused him of taking bread from Iraqi children's mouths. The New York Post denounced the investigation as a cover-up, while Safire referred insultingly to Annan's "manipulative abuse of Paul Volcker," whose reputation for integrity, he said, "is being shredded by a web of sticky-fingered officials and see-no-evil bureaucrats desperate to protect the man on top who hired him to substitute for--and thereby to abort--prompt and truly independent investigation."
The witch hunters kept the caldron bubbling along until, at the end of October, Annan wrote a private letter to Iraqi Interim President Iyad Allawi, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bush, suggesting that a frontal assault on Falluja was not the way to win Iraqi hearts and minds. After all, at the request of Washington, the UN is supposed to be overseeing elections there. Then the pot bubbled over. Within days, Fox's Bill O'Reilly was pontificating that "it's becoming increasingly clear that UN chief Kofi Annan is hurting the USA." On November 18 former New York Mayor Edward Koch followed with a column in the New York Sun claiming that Annan's "ability to lead the UN is seriously impaired. He no longer has the confidence of America because of his failure to create a consensus on Iraq among the permanent members." On November 24 National Review declared that "Annan should either resign, if he is honorable, or be removed, if he is not." This was echoed on November 29 by Safire, who ended a New York Times column with the comment that the "scandal" would not end "until Kofi Annan, even if personally innocent, resigns--having, through initial ineptitude and final obstructionism, brought dishonor on the Secretariat of the United Nations." Finally, on December 1 in the Wall Street Journal, Norm Coleman, the chair of the Senate investigations committee, called for Annan's resignation. Inspired by his example, Representative Scott Garrett raved a few days later, "To me the question should not be whether Kofi Annan should be in charge. To me, the larger question is whether he should be in jail."
When asked, President Bush pointedly did not repudiate Coleman's call with any expression of confidence in Annan but simply called for the investigation to take its course. A week later, after Blair had joined the rest of the world in expressing warm support for Annan and delegates in the General Assembly had given him a standing ovation, even the White House realized the damage Coleman & Co. had done to American diplomacy.
The best that Bush could manage was to have his lame-duck UN ambassador, John Danforth, give a halfhearted expression of support on his behalf. An unabashed Coleman read between the lines and held his ground: "I simply do not share the Administration's position on this matter," he said. "It is my personal and steadfast belief that Mr. Annan should step down in order to protect the long-term integrity and credibility of the United Nations."
The attacks on Annan and the UN are not likely to abate soon. Bashing the UN is an issue that allows the unilateral interventionists to ring the till, gathering support from paleocon isolationists across the country. As one GOP staffer embarrassed by Coleman's Joe McCarthy imitations gloomily predicted, the right wing is not going to drop the subject, because "they raise too much money out of bashing the UN, from the big foundations and from those small-town Rush Limbaughs."
Former Gore 2000 campaign head Donna Brazile, who says she is reconsidering her affiliation with the FDD, denounced the calls for Annan's resignation before the investigation is finished. "I worked on Capitol Hill before Kofi Annan, and the UN has always been a dirty word there," Brazile noted. "It just goes back to the neocons and their entire approach to multilateral institutions and their role in the world. They've got the airwaves to themselves. I just hope the Democrats stand up against them on this issue."
If the Democrats want to do that, they should begin by distancing themselves from the Democratic Leadership Council's shameful call for Annan's resignation and join those who signed Representative Dennis Kucinich's letter deploring the attacks. And they should join Representative Henry Waxman in demanding that the Governmental Reform Committee investigate the real oil-for-food scandal: what happened to the more than $8 billion unspent from the oil-for-food program that the United States insisted be handed over to the "Iraq Development Fund," overseen by US occupation authority head Paul Bremer. The rest of the Security Council reluctantly agreed to this payment, but only on condition that the fund be monitored by international auditors. The auditors were never allowed to do their work, and it is now suspected that most of that money went to Halliburton on no-bid contracts. Now there are grounds for some resignations. But you know who won't be calling for them.
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Monday, November 12, 2007
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Rum and Revolution
And my new www.rumpundit.net site is up and walking and will soon be up to speed. Check it out!
Rum and Revolution
Ian Williams
Changesurfer Radio
Posted: Oct 20, 2007
Dr. J. talks with United Nations correspondent Ian Williams about his book Rum: A Social and Sociable History of the Real Spirit of 1776 and his thoughts on the future of multilateralism. (MP3) Ian Williams’ blog and website
Listen/View
Rum and Revolution
Ian Williams
Changesurfer Radio
Posted: Oct 20, 2007
Dr. J. talks with United Nations correspondent Ian Williams about his book Rum: A Social and Sociable History of the Real Spirit of 1776 and his thoughts on the future of multilateralism. (MP3) Ian Williams’ blog and website
Listen/View
Friday, November 09, 2007
Driving Them Out
Yesterday's Comment is Free piece (full text here below) was the bait to bring out exactly what I described - seems that many commentators were happy to have a class of illegal helots here with no rights.
Xenophobia at the wheel
New York's Democratic governor Eliot Spitzer makes a sensible proposal on driver's licences for immigrants - and promptly hits a red light.
Ian Williams
November 8, 2007 5:30 PM | Printable version
HL Mencken identified puritans as people with "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." It is in the same spirit that American xenophobes are attacking New York governor Eliot Spitzer's eminently sensible proposal to offer immigrants the opportunity to get a state driver's licence even if they don't have a social security number. The xenophobes would rather encourage hit and run driving by unlicensed, uninsured drivers than allow illegals to be in anyway recognised.
There are anywhere between eight to 20 million undocumented immigrants in the US, most of them economically active. Given the size and nature of the country, that means they usually need to drive.
Fulminating vigilantes aside, there is no coherent effort to identify and deport this massive reserve labour army. So the rational question posed by Spitzer, and the rational answer, is that instead of having 20 million untested and uninsured drivers on the roads, each a potential widow-maker and breadwinner-maimer in a country without universal health coverage, they should be able to pass the (very minimal) test of driving competence, and record their addresses and contact details and get insurance.
This is clearly a measure that, apart from being good for the immigrants involved, is good for the society as a whole. But of course it has run into a storm of objections, and even the Democratic primary candidates at the recent debate did not have the spine to stand up for it. Indeed Hillary's tortuously evasive response proved that "Clintonesque" is a gender neutral adjective.
There are indeed complications. In a democracy where an identity card would be rightly seen as an intrusion by the government into the life of citizens, the social security number and the driver's licence have been de facto ID cards for years. In a country where even most legislators did not hold passports when elected, driver's licences are needed to vote, to fly and even to enter most office buildings and the population is broken to the subservient habit because the puritanical raising of the legal age for drinking to 21, accustoms young people to using their licence as proof of age.
The objectors to Spitzer's proposal are in this great puritan tradition of xenophobia. The licence is not a simple proof of ability to move a motor. Rather, it is a "privilege" not to be lavished on illegals. The IRS, always more hardbitten, already makes taxpayer IDs available to immigrants without social security numbers, and the driver licence proposal would encourage even more of them to come forward. I have yet to hear the upsurge of protest against the IRS for extending the "privilege" of tax paying to undocumented immigrants.
If in fact, the objectors had serious plans to rid the country of illegals, they would welcome Spitzer's proposal since it would compile a database of addresses and names of millions of illegals.
Indeed, his compromise, that the the new licences be clearly marked as not valid as an ID would make them even more vulnerable, except that few outside the Ku Klux Klan are really envisaging the uprooting of families and dislocation to the US economy that mass deportations would entail. After all, who would mow the lawn, rake the leaves and plough the snow or wash the dishes for the legislators if that happened?
Spitzer deserves more support for a proposal that is clearly in the common collective interest, and at least ensures a modicum of security and dignity for people who, vigilantes notwithstanding, are here to stay. It seems yet another issue for the Democratic contenders to duck and weave, instead of stand and fight.
Xenophobia at the wheel
New York's Democratic governor Eliot Spitzer makes a sensible proposal on driver's licences for immigrants - and promptly hits a red light.
Ian Williams
November 8, 2007 5:30 PM | Printable version
HL Mencken identified puritans as people with "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." It is in the same spirit that American xenophobes are attacking New York governor Eliot Spitzer's eminently sensible proposal to offer immigrants the opportunity to get a state driver's licence even if they don't have a social security number. The xenophobes would rather encourage hit and run driving by unlicensed, uninsured drivers than allow illegals to be in anyway recognised.
There are anywhere between eight to 20 million undocumented immigrants in the US, most of them economically active. Given the size and nature of the country, that means they usually need to drive.
Fulminating vigilantes aside, there is no coherent effort to identify and deport this massive reserve labour army. So the rational question posed by Spitzer, and the rational answer, is that instead of having 20 million untested and uninsured drivers on the roads, each a potential widow-maker and breadwinner-maimer in a country without universal health coverage, they should be able to pass the (very minimal) test of driving competence, and record their addresses and contact details and get insurance.
This is clearly a measure that, apart from being good for the immigrants involved, is good for the society as a whole. But of course it has run into a storm of objections, and even the Democratic primary candidates at the recent debate did not have the spine to stand up for it. Indeed Hillary's tortuously evasive response proved that "Clintonesque" is a gender neutral adjective.
There are indeed complications. In a democracy where an identity card would be rightly seen as an intrusion by the government into the life of citizens, the social security number and the driver's licence have been de facto ID cards for years. In a country where even most legislators did not hold passports when elected, driver's licences are needed to vote, to fly and even to enter most office buildings and the population is broken to the subservient habit because the puritanical raising of the legal age for drinking to 21, accustoms young people to using their licence as proof of age.
The objectors to Spitzer's proposal are in this great puritan tradition of xenophobia. The licence is not a simple proof of ability to move a motor. Rather, it is a "privilege" not to be lavished on illegals. The IRS, always more hardbitten, already makes taxpayer IDs available to immigrants without social security numbers, and the driver licence proposal would encourage even more of them to come forward. I have yet to hear the upsurge of protest against the IRS for extending the "privilege" of tax paying to undocumented immigrants.
If in fact, the objectors had serious plans to rid the country of illegals, they would welcome Spitzer's proposal since it would compile a database of addresses and names of millions of illegals.
Indeed, his compromise, that the the new licences be clearly marked as not valid as an ID would make them even more vulnerable, except that few outside the Ku Klux Klan are really envisaging the uprooting of families and dislocation to the US economy that mass deportations would entail. After all, who would mow the lawn, rake the leaves and plough the snow or wash the dishes for the legislators if that happened?
Spitzer deserves more support for a proposal that is clearly in the common collective interest, and at least ensures a modicum of security and dignity for people who, vigilantes notwithstanding, are here to stay. It seems yet another issue for the Democratic contenders to duck and weave, instead of stand and fight.
Thursday, November 08, 2007
China and the Democracy Thing
This is my reply to Yu Bin, whose reply to me strikes me as somewhat evasive. The thousand Chinese Missiles and the explicit threat to invade if Taiwan does not do what it is told are what we commonly call an ultimatum in the rest of the world.
Taiwan's Right to a State
Ian Williams | November 8, 2007
Editor: John Feffer
www.fpif.org
Yu Bin takes as axiomatic that Taiwan has no right to independence, regardless of the views of its people, although he admits that they are overwhelmingly in favor of it. Indeed, in his view Taiwan appears to be a metaphysical construct sundered from its own people. "Ultimately, Taiwan is cheating Washington, as well as the rest of the world -- all, ironically, in the name of democracy. One wonders if a democracy should be held to a higher, not lower, ethical standard," he said. Since when has implementing what people probably want been "cheating"?
The analogy he makes between North Korea and Taiwan had some relevance 30 years but contemporary reality strains it to breaking point. The only serious threat to the Kim regime in North Korea is its own spectacular economic incompetence, which is a necessary consequence of its idiosyncratic totalitarianism. South Korea's worse nightmare would be to inherit responsibility for the bankrupt North, even though both sides express nominal aspiration for unification.
However the differences are more salient than the superficial similarities. While Beijing maintains official state relations with Pyongyang in as normal a fashion as possible for such a regime, Washington bows to Beijing's pressure and extremely limited inter-state relations with Taiwan. As I said, this does pose serious problems, by sending the wrong message to the hawks in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and depriving Washington of influence in Taiwan.
Yu Bin claims that "North Korea strives for substance (survival and security), while Taiwan is obsessed with superficiality (self-identity and self-righteousness)." However, he also asserts, "Nor should it be interpreted that the Mainland is not prepared militarily in the event of crisis," which is clearly a matter of some objective substance compared with the paranoia of Pyongyang. A thousand PRC missiles pointing across the Straits toward its "compatriots" in Taiwan and the anti-secession Act "legalizing" military action against the island are hardly "superficial" issues.
Taiwan has abandoned the revanchist claims to the Mainland of the Republic of China (ROC). In the peculiar looking-glass view of the PRC, this means that the island's government is threatening stability in the region. History is generally more logical: it is the deliverer of ultimata rather than the recipient that threatens stability. In fact Taiwan's renunciation of the nuclear option is highly commendable and restrained in the circumstances.
It is not provocative to hold views different from the government of China, where even peaceful "secessionist activities," are treated as active treason. Just consider how unlikely it would be for a British or Canadian government to send troops to prevent a democratically mandated secession by Scotland or Quebec. In fact a British claim to Ireland based on a much longer occupation has more credibility than China's title to Taiwan but London wisely refrains from making it. In the modern world, countries do not annex territories against the will of the inhabitants.
Regardless, Yu Bin claims, "An independent Taiwan is unacceptable to any regime on the mainland, be it traditional, communist, or democratic." This is hypothetical since in stark contrast to Taiwan there is no mechanism to ascertain the views of the mainland Chinese. As I pointed out in my original piece, if Mao Zedong could envisage self-determination for Taiwan, and the Chinese Soviet Republic constitution could guarantee it for minorities, then so can any future regime in Beijing.
In contrast, while Taiwan's government is obviously playing to the gallery of public opinion with its referendum on the UN application, it will also unequivocally establish for the international community, not least that part of which professes democratic values and the right to self-determination, the will of the Taiwanese population, which Yu Bin admits is overwhelmingly against reunification.
He refers to desinification as a nefarious policy, which is a peculiarly PRC view. It is perfectly possible for countries to share languages and cultures but to form different polities, as the Austrians and the Germans, Spain and most of Latin America, and Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and even the United States so eloquently demonstrate. The Taiwanese government is certainly emphasizing the distinctive aspects of the island's life such as the indigenous tribes. In fact, one Kuomintang (KMT) official claimed that the emphasis on protecting and emphasizing tribal culture was the result of seeing the official policy toward minorities in the PRC. Singapore's overwhelmingly Chinese culture does not mandate annexation by Beijing.
"A more peaceful and mutually beneficial compromise on the Taiwan issue remains wide open," says Yu Bin. It takes two to compromise. Anything that does not leave Taiwan with effective recognition as a state will not be acceptable to the Taiwanese voters. If China could accept as a face-saver even as exiguous a relationship as, say the British queen as head of state of New Zealand, that could work. But the PRC's insistence on inheriting the mandate of heaven that the Manchus had is at odds with its own history and with modern democratic practice.
There is little doubt that many in the Bush administration would like to throw Taiwan to the wolves, in order to court China's cooperation in the way he suggests. But politically, at home and with its allies in the region, the administration cannot and in fact should not abandon its commitment to Taiwan.
Ian Williams contributes frequently to Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org) on UN and international affairs. More of his work is available on www.deadlinepundit.blogspot.com.
For More Information
This strategic dialogue consists of two original pieces -- Yu Bin's America's Rogue Ally and Ian Williams's Support Taiwan's Democracy -- and two responses, this one and Yu Bin's Making Democracy Safe for the World.
Taiwan's Right to a State
Ian Williams | November 8, 2007
Editor: John Feffer
www.fpif.org
Yu Bin takes as axiomatic that Taiwan has no right to independence, regardless of the views of its people, although he admits that they are overwhelmingly in favor of it. Indeed, in his view Taiwan appears to be a metaphysical construct sundered from its own people. "Ultimately, Taiwan is cheating Washington, as well as the rest of the world -- all, ironically, in the name of democracy. One wonders if a democracy should be held to a higher, not lower, ethical standard," he said. Since when has implementing what people probably want been "cheating"?
The analogy he makes between North Korea and Taiwan had some relevance 30 years but contemporary reality strains it to breaking point. The only serious threat to the Kim regime in North Korea is its own spectacular economic incompetence, which is a necessary consequence of its idiosyncratic totalitarianism. South Korea's worse nightmare would be to inherit responsibility for the bankrupt North, even though both sides express nominal aspiration for unification.
However the differences are more salient than the superficial similarities. While Beijing maintains official state relations with Pyongyang in as normal a fashion as possible for such a regime, Washington bows to Beijing's pressure and extremely limited inter-state relations with Taiwan. As I said, this does pose serious problems, by sending the wrong message to the hawks in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and depriving Washington of influence in Taiwan.
Yu Bin claims that "North Korea strives for substance (survival and security), while Taiwan is obsessed with superficiality (self-identity and self-righteousness)." However, he also asserts, "Nor should it be interpreted that the Mainland is not prepared militarily in the event of crisis," which is clearly a matter of some objective substance compared with the paranoia of Pyongyang. A thousand PRC missiles pointing across the Straits toward its "compatriots" in Taiwan and the anti-secession Act "legalizing" military action against the island are hardly "superficial" issues.
Taiwan has abandoned the revanchist claims to the Mainland of the Republic of China (ROC). In the peculiar looking-glass view of the PRC, this means that the island's government is threatening stability in the region. History is generally more logical: it is the deliverer of ultimata rather than the recipient that threatens stability. In fact Taiwan's renunciation of the nuclear option is highly commendable and restrained in the circumstances.
It is not provocative to hold views different from the government of China, where even peaceful "secessionist activities," are treated as active treason. Just consider how unlikely it would be for a British or Canadian government to send troops to prevent a democratically mandated secession by Scotland or Quebec. In fact a British claim to Ireland based on a much longer occupation has more credibility than China's title to Taiwan but London wisely refrains from making it. In the modern world, countries do not annex territories against the will of the inhabitants.
Regardless, Yu Bin claims, "An independent Taiwan is unacceptable to any regime on the mainland, be it traditional, communist, or democratic." This is hypothetical since in stark contrast to Taiwan there is no mechanism to ascertain the views of the mainland Chinese. As I pointed out in my original piece, if Mao Zedong could envisage self-determination for Taiwan, and the Chinese Soviet Republic constitution could guarantee it for minorities, then so can any future regime in Beijing.
In contrast, while Taiwan's government is obviously playing to the gallery of public opinion with its referendum on the UN application, it will also unequivocally establish for the international community, not least that part of which professes democratic values and the right to self-determination, the will of the Taiwanese population, which Yu Bin admits is overwhelmingly against reunification.
He refers to desinification as a nefarious policy, which is a peculiarly PRC view. It is perfectly possible for countries to share languages and cultures but to form different polities, as the Austrians and the Germans, Spain and most of Latin America, and Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and even the United States so eloquently demonstrate. The Taiwanese government is certainly emphasizing the distinctive aspects of the island's life such as the indigenous tribes. In fact, one Kuomintang (KMT) official claimed that the emphasis on protecting and emphasizing tribal culture was the result of seeing the official policy toward minorities in the PRC. Singapore's overwhelmingly Chinese culture does not mandate annexation by Beijing.
"A more peaceful and mutually beneficial compromise on the Taiwan issue remains wide open," says Yu Bin. It takes two to compromise. Anything that does not leave Taiwan with effective recognition as a state will not be acceptable to the Taiwanese voters. If China could accept as a face-saver even as exiguous a relationship as, say the British queen as head of state of New Zealand, that could work. But the PRC's insistence on inheriting the mandate of heaven that the Manchus had is at odds with its own history and with modern democratic practice.
There is little doubt that many in the Bush administration would like to throw Taiwan to the wolves, in order to court China's cooperation in the way he suggests. But politically, at home and with its allies in the region, the administration cannot and in fact should not abandon its commitment to Taiwan.
Ian Williams contributes frequently to Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org) on UN and international affairs. More of his work is available on www.deadlinepundit.blogspot.com.
For More Information
This strategic dialogue consists of two original pieces -- Yu Bin's America's Rogue Ally and Ian Williams's Support Taiwan's Democracy -- and two responses, this one and Yu Bin's Making Democracy Safe for the World.
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