Accidentally on Purpose

With the Israeli bombing of a UN camp and the killing of four UN peacekeepers, we really do seem to be in a "deja vu" all over again phase. Already UN Secretary General Kofi Annan is under attack for condemning the "apparently deliberate targeting by Israeli Defense Forces of a UN Observer post."

It is reminiscent of the trouble his predecessor Boutros Boutros-Ghali got himself into last time the Israelis tried shock and awe on Lebanon back in 1996, when he failed to suppress a report that said pretty much the same thing about the IDF shelling of the UN post in Qana, which macerated some 106 Lebanese civilians to death.

It is worth remembering that of all UN Secretary Generals, Annan has done most to end Israel's isolation in the organization and maintained the closest relations with Israel's friends in the US. In the end, however, he is also an S-G who sets great store by protecting UN staff, and so the palpable anger of his statement is entirely understandable.

"This coordinated artillery and aerial attack on a long established and clearly marked UN post at Khiyam occurred despite personal assurances given to me by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that UN positions would be spared Israeli fire. Furthermore, General Alain Pellegrino, the UN Force Commander in south Lebanon, had been in repeated contact with Israeli officers throughout the day on Tuesday, stressing the need to protect that particular UN position from attack."


So to accept it was yet another accident presupposes a level of incompetence or insubordination in the Israeli army that should see result in some serious court-martials, but never does. That feeling was doubtless exacerbated when the IDF shelled the site and prevented a rescue operation.

So what could be the motive? It is clear that there are many in the IDF with a profound contempt for the UN and all it stands for, and who would not shed many tears at such an accident. It may also rankle that UNIFIL has,with the dearth of Western reporters in much of South Lebanon, provided independent corroboration of many incidents of IDF attacks on civilians. One only has to think of the fate of the USS Liberty in 1967 for being in a position to observe what the IDF was up to when the Israeli's bombed and shelled an American ship for over an hour, killing 34 American sailors and wounding 170 more.

And most sinisterly of all, there are many Israelis-including the government only a few days ago, who do not want an international force between them and their targets in Lebanon, who would have no great scruples about bombing a UN compound "accidentally on purpose."

This time, the "collateral damage" is not just four dead UN personnel. The bombing scotches any realistic chance of a reinforced UN or multinational peacekeeping force-which it is worth remembering that Israel itself opposed until a few days ago, and which the war party in Israel sees as a potential obstacle to their attempts to emulate Ariel Sharon's disastrous invasion in 1982. (See the Israeli peace group Gush Shalom's ad in Ha-Aretz at the end of the article).

Already, while many countries have endorsed the general idea of putting foreign troops on the Lebanese side of the border, there has been a complete lack of specific volunteers-for the understandable reasons that the attack on Khiyam now so forcibly demonstrates.

Third world militaries like the Fijians and Ghanaians make lots of money out of providing peacekeepers for UNIFIL and seem to think weekly humiliation by the Israelis and Hezbollah is worth it. There are few serious military powers would contemplate sending their troops for IDF target practice, let alone Hezbollah attacks. And who knows? If any were so bold as to put in contingents, they may well stand up to Israeli incursions as well.

Some Israel supporters are already arguing that the bombing could not have been deliberate because it was a public relations disaster for Israel. Excuse me, but only an American or Israeli commentator could say that. Manifestly, for the rest of the world, the whole Israeli campaign is a PR disaster, with massive majorities even in Blair's Britain regarding the Israeli attack as a massively disproportionate reaction, let alone how Israel's assault is turning Hezbollah into the toast of the Third World. There is some added piquancy that both the Lebanese and Iraqi prime ministers (until this week at least champions of the democratic "New Middle East") are condemning Israel's assault.

Condoleezza Rice's statement that it is "too early" for a ceasefire, when only five hundred were dead and countless more dismembered, should go down with Madeleine Albright's since regretted statement that the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children as a result of sanctions was "a price worth paying."

Since Annan is already going at the end of year, which puts him beyond reach of Bolton's veto, we can but hope that he will not be browbeaten by Rice, Bolton or Bush, but will use the sacrifice of the UN observers to shame the Security Council into demanding an immediate ceasefire.

And who knows, while he is still angry, he may wish to remind them that Israel was defying Resolution 242 for many decades before 1559, and that it has to be a crucial foundation for any peace settlement for the region.

Gush Shalom Ad
BACK TO 1982

THEN: The war was prepared well in advance.
THIS TIME: The same.

THEN: We went to war only to protect "the Peace of Galilee".
THIS TIME: We go to war to protect Haifa and Afula, too.

THEN: We waited for a provocation (the attempt on the life of Ambassador Argov).
THIS TIME: We waited for a provocation (the capture of two soldiers).

THEN: "We shall advance only 40 KM in order to eliminate the Katyushas."
THIS TIME: "We shall advance only a few kilometers in order to eliminate the rockets."

THEN: Sharon acted behind the back of the cabinet.
THIS TIME: Olmert-Peretz-Halutz act behind the back of the ministers.

THEN: We destroyed Lebanon.
THIS TIME: We are destroying Lebanon.

THEN: Only the PLO profited from the war. A few years later they returned to Palestine.
THIS TIME: Only Hezbollah will profit from the war. Their prestige in the Arab world increases every day.

THEN: We were stuck in the quagmire for 18 years.

FOR HOW LONG SHALL WE BE STUCK THIS TIME?


GUSH SHALOM
The Israeli Peace Block

(Large ad published in Haaretz, 26.7.06)

Sharon's Brainless Malice Marches On

This is a written version of what I was trying to say on Scarborough, O'Reilly etc this week. And maybe I am a hopeless optimist, but I think even they were having doubts as the pictures of Lebanese victims come in.

The Nation| posted July 20, 2006
The UN's Mideast Mission
Ian Williams

April marked the tenth anniversary of the massacre at Qana, when Israeli Defense Forces poured shells onto a UN peacekeepers' base where more than 800 Lebanese civilians had taken shelter. The shells killed 106 people and, according to some accounts, resulted in the sacking of UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali for releasing a report that showed that the IDF shelling was no accident.
A decade later, the Qana massacre all seems forgotten. But Israel's attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon and on Hamas in Gaza appear to be a replay of the 1996 military campaign known as Operation Grapes of Wrath. Then as now, civilians are caught in the crossfire between Israel and its enemies. Then as now, the attacks seem designed to demonstrate Israel's toughness for a domestic audience. Then as now, there are calls to the United Nations for an international force to quell the conflict.
Israeli leaders have become accustomed to the impunity that superpower support has given them. To use bombs supplied by Washington to destroy the Gaza power station that US taxpayers have insured to the tune of almost $50 million is the very definition of chutzpah.
There have been some changes in the world since 1996, one of them being the International Criminal Court. Ironically, if it were not for the baleful influence of Damascus, Lebanon would probably have signed and ratified the ICC treaty--which would have considerably disrupted the vacation plans of the Israeli Cabinet and military commanders now engaged in making thousands of Lebanese homeless--and a considerable number lifeless. They would have been subject to international arrest warrants and a quick trip to The Hague.
It is true that Hezbollah and the Hamas factions that are rocketing civilians are also breaking international law, but no more so than the rockets and bombs from Israeli helicopters eviscerating families on the beaches of Gaza and in the apartments of Beirut.
Only the most meager special pleading could describe Israel's counter-blast at Lebanese civilians, not to mention the ongoing attacks in Gaza, as a legitimate or proportionate response. Since the invocation of Israel guarantees a free pass in much of the Western world, it may be useful to substitute different terms.
Imagine if the British had been buzzing Dublin Castle to show their displeasure with the Irish Republican Army, whose political wing is, after all, represented in the Irish Dail. The IRA kidnap some British soldiers. In return, London blockades Ireland, shells and strafes the area closest to the Northern Ireland border, bombs Shannon and Dublin airports, knocks out roads, power stations and gas stations, in between sending in snatch squads to kill and kidnap Irish citizens and politicians it considers connected to the IRA. And in between London threatens Rome, because after all the IRA are Roman Catholics, and Boston and New York, because after all that is where the IRA were getting their money.
Meanwhile, George W. Bush and the European Union would have supported such a measured response to "terror." Like hell they would.
Luckily for all, the British finally bit the bullet and sat down with the "terrorists"; both parts of Ireland are much more peaceful for it. And by the way, London did not insist that the IRA recognize that it was right that Northern Ireland was established, nor that it should forever be a safe homeland for Irish Protestants. Almost as bad as the illegality of the Israeli assaults is their irrationality. To begin with, a massively indiscriminate attack like this is hardly the best way to persuade Gilad Shalit's captors to show mercy.
On the contrary, from the days of Likud's origins in the Stern Gang, on through the FLN in Algeria, one of the most successful tactics of terrorism has been to provoke massive collective reprisals by the authorities. And Israel's actions only create more sympathy for Hezbollah and Hamas.
If, as many observers suspect, Israel does invade Lebanon, it will show that it is still being ruled by the essentially brain-dead Ariel Sharon, with no foresight for the lethal consequences. Either the IDF stays, and suffers the type of continuous bloodletting that drove them out last time, or they ransack the place and evacuate, leaving an even more embittered and hardened Hezbollah-supporting populace.
Sadly, it would appear that George W. Bush's brain is in no better working order than Sharon's. In Iraq, he has 150,000 potential hostages to Iran, Syria and the Shiites. He has oil prices just waiting to shoot through his bubble economy. Someone should really sit down and tell him about the unintended consequences of the extrajudicial execution of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914.
And the best Bush can do is to tell Kofi Annan to get on the phone to Damascus "to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit."
The neocons who gave us Iraq seem to have persuaded Bush that if you are up to your neck in a cesspool, the only way out is down. The idea that Hezbollah is a tool of Tehran is about as substantive as the idea that Israel is a puppet of Washington. But the canard that Damascus and Tehran may be behind it all is hypnotically attractive to those who want the United States to attack them. One notes with worry that American media are accepting the Administration's simplistic fictions almost as readily as they swallowed Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.
While it is almost reflexive to appeal to the United Nations, sadly, there is little or nothing that Annan or the international body can do about this. Annan's idea for an international force has been tried before--and the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) was regularly targeted by the Israelis and ignored by both the Palestinians and Hezbollah. Any force there would have to be prepared to take on Israeli incursions as well as controlling Lebanese militia or it would have no legitimacy. It would likely end up being disarmed by Hezbollah rather than vice versa. The United Nations can be a useful tool in settling the crisis, but only with US support, and that support has to include pressure on Israel and some declared support for international law. Only Bush can balance that equation by getting on the phone to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and telling him to stop.
It would help if the other member states of the UN--and the Secretary General--stopped accommodating Bush's simplistic view of the world. It would also help if they had the courage to put first things first: Resolution 242, telling Israel to quit the occupied territories has been waiting for UN action long before Resolution 1559, which calls for disarming Hezbollah. If the UN could succeed in doing that, who knows--Bush might even take notice--and if he emulated his father's refusal to support settlements, even Israel might reconsider.

Alienated Nation

I have been moving and once settled in, will be posting much more frequently.

In the meantime, try this from last week,
The Washington Spectator, July 15, 2006
ALIEN NATION: America's Curious Hatred of the United Nations
By Ian Williams

To subscribe to the Washington Spectator click here.

MaximsNews is also carrying the full article.


In Max Frisch's play The Fire Raisers, the respectable Herr Biedermann prefers to accept the palpably thin excuses that his tenants offer as they haul wagonloads of incendiary materials into his house, because that is easier than taking any action.
Something like that is happening now. While the congressional and media types who magnify molehills of U.N. peccadilloes into mountains of scandal often piously invoke the need to reform the United Nations, their real and often overtly stated intention is to overthrow the world organization, its charter, and the whole corpus of international law, multilateral treaties and conventions that support its purpose. Insofar as they have a transitional program, it is to undermine the principles behind the institution, and bend it to conform to Washington's increasingly flexible perceptions of international law.
There is an Anglo-Saxon tendency to defer to people who hold sincere and fervent beliefs, so perhaps it is worthwhile to establish the essential irrationality of these U.N. detractors, measuring them not against any highfalutin ideas of international peace and brotherhood, but against the interests of the United States that Congressman Henry Hyde (R-IL), Senator Norm Coleman (R-MN) and the like so often invoke.
ORPHANING THE U.N. To begin with, the United Nations was essentially a creation of the United States, designed to American specifications, and has largely served American interests. Washington usually gets what it wants from the U.N.,and especially so when what it wants is consonant with international law. More to the point is that the U.S. veto effectively stops the U.N. from ever doing anything that Washington does not want.
In years past, the U.N. has blessed the first Gulf War, maintained sanctions against Iraq and Yugoslavia, and, more recently, begun to put the squeeze on Syria, all at the behest of Washington. Even though it failed to win the organization's support for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the U.S. shortly afterward persuaded the Security Council to let it have some Oil for Food surpluses and confiscated Iraqi funds.
There is some consolation in the fact that the U.N. baiters still feel the need to disguise their intentions, because despite the concerted media assault on the U.N., polls consistently show that a majority of Americans tend to support it. However, they tend to be diffident in their enthusiasm. In the missing question box at the end of most polls, they tend to tick "No" or "Undecided" if asked "Are you going to do anything about it?"
In contrast, for a significant and vociferous minority of their compatriots mention of the United Nations switches off the higher mental faculties in the same way that "terrorism" does. What they see is not a complex organization and process for helping the peoples and nations of the world take common or concerted action against global problems. They see a bogeyman, something to frighten children at night, or more usually, to get eccentrics to write checks for the causes of those preying on the fears. Since all human life is on the agenda somewhere in the U.N. system, the organization has considerable potential to incite many of the more excitable citizenry into paroxysms of rage.
Birth control, abortion, guns, (other people's) weapons of mass destruction, attacks on Israel, U.N. Heritage sites, child soldiers, the Law of the Sea: there is no end to the perceived threats to American sovereignty.
COURTING THE WACKO VOTE American "exceptionalists," from the neocons like Richard Perle to the paleocons like John Bolton and his former patron Jesse Helms, are not talking idly. They firmly believe that the U.S. does not have to follow any externally mandated rules, and they can call upon hosts of supporters to back them up almost anytime they hit at the U.N.
Michael Scanlon, the former aide to Representative Tom DeLay (R-TX), provided the perfect description of the methodology used by groups like the National Rifle Association (NRA) to tap into this subculture. Scanlon, who misused Indian tribes' money to further his political schemes, describes the process perfectly.
Our mission is to get specifically selected groups of individuals to the polls to speak out against something. To that end, your money is best spent finding them and communicating with them on using the modes that they are most likely to respond to. Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them. The wackos get their information form [sic] the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet, and telephone trees.
If you want to see the process at work, look no further than than NRA leader Wayne LaPierre on the gun group's StopUNGunBan.org website, which urges people to buy his book The Global War on Your Guns, and perhaps more pertinently, inveighs against the U.N. as the "new face of global socialism."
No matter how many reassurances the world body had issued that it was no threat to the internal sale of weapons under any interpretation of the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment, the NRA went ahead and took a cheap shot at the U.N. This is the mind-set of many Americans: when things go wrong internationally it is always the U.N.'s fault.
Similarly, oil company lobbyists inveighing against the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, which seeks to control greenhouse gas emissions, can drill into the same rich wells of prejudice. While the companies offer the superficially more sophisticated argument that science has not yet demonstrably proven that the emissions cause global warming, the potent subtext is that the rejection of Kyoto and the refusal to control emissions are somehow a patriotic reaffirmation of sovereignty rather than a self-destructive demonstration of gluttony.
As senseless as the attacks can be, they can have their effects. The inflated and incendiary allegations over Oil for Food, fanned in exactly the same wacko wildfire mode, managed to divert the attention of Kofi Annan from management reforms, while driving popular American support for the U.N. to an all-time low.
It is illustrative that while for over a year columnists were flinging mud at the U.N. over allegations of corruption and abuse in the handling of Oil for Food revenues, they lost interest as soon as a report by Paul Volcker showed that it was governments and private companies that were the guilty parties. They showed no interest at all when a Bush-appointed auditor confessed that he could not track what had happened to the $10 billion in Oil for Food surpluses that the U.N. had handed over to the American occupation authorities for Iraqi redevelopment.
U.N. HATERS AT THE HELM There are immediate, short-term effects of the peculiar American hostility to the U.N. ranging from the petty, such as the grandstanding efforts of some New York State legislators to frustrate the rebuilding plans for the U.N. headquarters in Manhattan, to the profound, such as the time the U.S. threatened to veto sending reinforcements to the peacekeepers during the Rwanda genocide, because the Clinton administration did want to ask Congress for the money.
In the longer term, the anti-U.N. lobby has hobbled the signature of the U.S. on major international conventions, often despite the wishes of the State Department or the incumbent in the White House.
As a result, sometimes the U.S. fulfills the terms of treaties but refuses to ratify them, as happened with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Or it signs treaties, but then sends signals that it does not intend to carry out its obligations to fulfill the promised terms, as it did with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The U.S. now claims the right to cherry-pick which parts of international laws and conventions it intends to abide by. So, while hinting at war to stop Iran's legal, if dangerous, moves toward uranium enrichment, the U.S. offers India a deal in total violation of the Nonproliferation Treaty that it is citing against Iran.
Then again, in 2004 the Pentagon and Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN), the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, pushed passage of the International Treaty on the Law of the Sea, but they were thwarted by the "backwoodsmen" in Congress, the isolationists who saw it as yet another pernicious attempt at global government. The U.S. Navy actually wanted it ratified because it would give them more freedom of passage, but such pragmatic considerations could not overcome the prejudices of the exceptionalists.
The Bush administration has taken disdain for the U.N. to previously unimaginable heights. Perhaps the most egregious gesture of official deference to the anti-U.N. lobby has been the appointment as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. of the belligerent John Bolton, who had spent decades denouncing the organization and calling for the U.S. to leave it.
His appointment by Bush while Congress was not in session gave an official blessing to the decades-long campaign against the U.N. by the conservative movement. In a similar vein, Christopher Burnham, currently in charge of the U.N.'s management and administration, and a former Bush administration official and fundraiser, actually thanked President Bush for his appointment last year, overlooking the fact that, nominally at least, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan had appointed him.
"I came here at the request of the White House. My primary loyalty is to the United States of America," Burnham told the Washington Post, seemingly unaware of the oath that an international civil servant such as himself takes on appointment, giving up national loyalties. It is worth noting that for decades during which American media and politicians have berated the U.N. for "waste, mismanagement and corruption," the U.N. official in charge of management has always been an American presidential appointee.
WORLD COURT WARS The campaign against the International Criminal Court, which was spearheaded by John Bolton, exemplifies how prejudices and irrational fears militate against real American diplomatic interests while exhibiting to the world the U.S.'s brand of overt nationalism. The U.S. "unsigned" the treaty establishing the Court, setting Washington at loggerheads with allies across the world, including all the members of the European Union. It refused to consider using the Court for the trial of Saddam Hussein, which would have saved both the American and the new Iraqi administrations no end of grief. Recently, it came close to vetoing U.N. resolutions on Darfur because the Court was asked to investigate the situation there.
At no point did the U.S. under Clinton or Bush object to application of the International Criminal Court's jurisdiction over the citizens of any other country in the world. Indeed, Clinton-era negotiators actually won a sympathetic hearing for the hypothesis that American military justice was so advanced that the ICC was almost irrelevant to U.S. forces. Other nations' negotiators cut a lot of slack for Washington, and allowed many clauses that, without spelling out an overt American exception, made it in practical terms virtually impossible for an American to appear there.
Regardless of that, Bolton spent four years bullying small nations into making ritual, and in many cases dubiously legal, riders to the ICC treaty that committed them to refuse to hand over American suspects. There could rarely have been a more explicit statement of U.S. exceptionalism. The administration that has "rendered" suspects from all over the world to the U.S. (or worse, perhaps, not quite to the U.S. in the case of Guantánamo) says that it is unconscionable for any American citizen to be given due process in The Hague.
Apart from such gestures of contempt, the invasion of Iraq, the effective repudiation of the Geneva Conventions and the other instances of global anarchism perpetrated by this administration show that its attitudes to international law and the U.N.'s "constitution," the Charter, are even more cavalier than its attitude to the U.S. Constitution. After all, while distorting or ignoring the Constitution, Bush's representatives have never actually disavowed it completely, as Bolton and his ilk have with the U.N. Charter.
U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali once noted that neither the Roman Empire nor the U.S. had any patience for diplomacy, which is "perceived by an imperial power as a waste of time and prestige and a sign of weakness." However, as the Goths, Huns and Vandals, among others, demonstrated, this was a dangerous misperception for the Romans, who also tended to forget what their leaders had done to the rest of the world when they had the upper hand.
BANNING THE BLUE FLAG So what can be done about it? Ironically, what for a brief time was wacko central out in Utah provides a positive sign. The heady witches' brew of exceptionalism, paranoia, and survivalist sovereignty all came together in 2002 when the city fathers of the tiny town of La Verkin banned the U.N. flag and insignia from being displayed within the town limits. They also denied all access to United Nations forces, and required anyone working for the world organization to register their infamy at the Town Hall. It also ordered the erection of signs declaring the town to be a U.N.-free zone.
And what is good about that? Well, the good citizens of the town when they saw how their elected officials had made them a national, not to mention an international laughingstock, promptly called a town meeting and threw them out, while reversing all the eccentric ordinances. So the question really is, when are the sane people across the U.S. and in the halls of government in Washington going to emulate the Verkinites of Utah?
There are some hopeful signs that Washington may already be beginning a Verkin-emulation campaign. After all, the Senate did refuse to approve John Bolton's nomination, even if thwarted by Bush's recess appointment, and Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA) emulated the little boy in the Hans Christian Anderson tale of the Emperor's new clothes by cutting down to size the wild allegations about the U.N. Oil for Food program.
There should be much more of that, and the rational wing of electors and elected should be making it plain that letting John Bolton and his crowd choose the next Secretary General makes as much sense as allowing the National Evangelical Association to choose the president of the American Institute of Biological Sciences.
Above all, as in Maurice Sendak's children's poem "Pierre," the moral is, "Care!" The U.N. may be boring, and sometimes bureaucratic and slow, but so is air traffic control. If someone tried to abolish that, legislators would be up in arms. When you see people trying to destabilize the world by abolishing one of the few effective tools we have for international peace and order, some determined action is called for.

Bye Bye Bolton

Time To Use a Choke Leash
SG Election too important to leave to Bolton.

It is approaching a year since the Bush administration sent John Bolton to the United Nations. In some ways, it is a foreign policy achievement of a high order to appoint someone who can has so successfully poked his thumb up the nostrils of almost 190 other countries simultaneously. However it is a dubious achievement.

As Bolton mouthed indignation at the Mark Malloch Brown's recent, almost grovellingly polite, exhortations to Washington to show proper leadership at the UN, he was of course compounding the immense damage he has already done to American diplomacy, which is, of course, exactly what the Deputy Secretary-General was pointing out.

In fact, for a long time, as Malloch Brown noted, albeit more politely, each successive US administration has used the United Nations and tossed it aside like a used condom after achieving its satisfaction. The difference is that Clinton would be sweet-talking as he did it, while this administration is much more into rough wooing, berating and belittling the organization before and after its perfunctory consummations.

Taking the International Criminal Court as an example, Clinton approved it in principle, but pandered to the Pentagon by having his emissaries water it down in negotiations, and then did not sign it until he was leaving office. It was a classic diplomatic application of the Clinton's "smoking but not inhaling," or "fellatio but no sex," approach.

Equally typically, Bolton promptly unsigned the attenuated treaty setting up the Court. But, emblematic of the difficulties that brute prejudice has when it clashes with reality, that Bolton is now trying to force Sudan to cooperate with the same ICC in its investigation of what the US claims is genocide.

The genocide issue itself shows a perverse continuity in American foreign policy. The Clinton administration fought shy of calling mass murders in the Balkans and Rwanda "genocide" because it believed that would entail a responsibility to act, and he was notoriously reluctant to risk American casualties.

In contrast, the Bush administration calls events in Darfur "genocide," because that is what the Evangelical Christians call it, but it argues that the Genocide Convention does not actually require signatories to intervene. Indeed Bolton is on the record as saying that he does not regard any international law as binding, at least on the US. The net effect is the same-the victims die while politicians score political points in Washington.

Underlying all this is a strange sub-current in US politics. While polls show consistently high American public support for international law and bodies like the UN, like most polls in the US, they should carry a rider: "So what're you gonna do about it." The good guys would mostly answer, "not a lot," while the sundry isolationists, xenophobes, unilateralists, survivalists and neo-cons have shown the mere existence of the UN renders them speechful with rage.

They will send donations, bombard legislators, and fill the Web with their virtual version of reality. Despite the widely different sources for their obsession with the UN, they unite in their hatred and fear of the world body. That makes them somewhat vulnerable to manipulation by the unscrupulous, of whom there are, shall we say, a statistically significant sample in the American political classes. Senator Joe McCarthy was one of a type, not a standalone figure.

The recent trials and Congressional inquiries into lobbying activities by former aide to Republican Senator Tom Delay, Michael Scanlon provided the perfect description of how anti-UN campaigners can tap into this sub-culture. He was using Indian tribes' money to stop off-reservation gambling, but the strategy is spot-on. "Our mission is to get specifically selected groups of individuals to the polls to speak out against something. To that end, your money is best spent finding them and communicating with them on using the modes that they are most likely to respond to. Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them. The wackos get their information form [sic] the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet, and telephone trees."

And how do they get away with it? Because there are few politicians are prepared to put themselves on the line for a multilateral policy in a system where "all politics is local." The exception that proves the rule is Congressman Jim Leach, one of the few Republicans whom Abraham Lincoln would recognize as a colleague.

At the same conference at which Malloch Brown barked back at attack dog Bolton, the Congressman said sadly, "Our policy response is an entirely parochial one, rooted in the so-called doctrine of American Exceptionalism, which neo-cons do not define as refining a shining city on a Hill but as the right of a superpower to place itself above the legal and institutional restraints applied to others. In the neo-con world, values are synonymous with power. The implicit assumption is that American security can be bought and managed alone, without allies, without consideration of contrasting international views or the effect of our policies on others."

So, is there light at the end of the tunnel? Well, the beginning of next year's Congressional session sees the end of Bolton's "emergency" appointment by Bush, because he could not secure endorsement by the Senate. Ironically, he has been calling for a clean sweep of senior UN officials to clear the deck for the new Secretary General, presumably in hopes that he can secure the appointment of someone abjectly servile to American policy.

The UN Secretary-Generalship is an important position, far too important to leave to the prejudices and whims of a dyspeptic walrus. One can only hope that sane voices like Congressman Leach and Condoleezza Rice get involved and remind Bolton that his time is up, and that the rest of the world expects more of a new Secretary General than dancing to the tune of assorted wackos. It is time to rally the too-silent majority of Americans to redeem their nation's plummeting international credibility, and to ensure that the world body that is still the bedrock of international stability is not lumbered with a Bolton clone for the next five year, or even ten years. We really do not want to grandfather in this administration's creative application of chaos theory to world affairs.


A slightly more polite version of this appeared in the Nation at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060710/williams

and another in the Asia Times, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/HF21Aa01.html
Bring out the Wackos

And, I only just discovered it is now on line, my article from a year ago in the New Internationalist http://www.newint.org/issue375/grimm-rewards.htm which argues that the US is an essential, if irritating, member of the organization.

Things to watch for: I am working on a book about the phobic American reaction to the UN and the rest of the UnAmerican world.

Mark Machiavelli Brown

UN TO US: End the Abuse


On Tuesday, the Century Foundation and Center for American Progress jointly hosted a conference on "Power and SuperPower." Its centerpiece was undoubtedly Deputy Secretary General Mark Malloch Brown's measured and merited admonition of the Bush administration's attempts to simultaneously use and abuse the United Nations.

Actually, many other, American, speakers at the conference were far more scathing, listing example after example of Washington's refusal to accept international law and conventions. It was a Thoughtcrime Fest that almost had me wondering why Homeland Security wasn't rappelling through the ceiling and kicking in the doors to arrest all, or at least most, of the participants.

If US Ambassador John Bolton had his way, they probably would have done.

What made it newsworthy was that Malloch Brown speech. It is one thing for rebel Republicans and Democrats to criticize American policy, but for a UN official to stand up and talk back inverts the laws of nature, which have hitherto decreed that the UN only has one position towards the United State: prone.

Bolton has made a lifetime career of abusing the organization and all who work for it, but his reaction was that of a bully suddenly confronted by someone who is not scared of him. The truth may not hurt-but it certainly stings.

Malloch Brown warned of "the serious consequences of a decades-long tendency by US Administrations of both parties to engage only fitfully with the UN," a point that was missed by some of the Clintonistas in the audience, who tend to overlook that administration's less than stellar multilateral record beneath the rhetoric at which its President was so adept.

Far from being anti-American, his speech was a call for American leadership in the organization. But he was being old fashioned, referring to the type of leadership that listens, and pulls a team together, rather than its modern Washington version of team play: beating up the other players and running off with the ball whenever the rules do not suit.


In the same vein, he suggested that one of the major problems about getting a majority vote for reforms of the United Nations was that "very unfortunately, there is currently a perception among many otherwise quite moderate countries that anything the US supports must have a secret agenda aimed at either subordinating multilateral processes to Washington's ends or weakening the institutions, and therefore, put crudely, should be opposed without any real discussion of whether they make sense or not."

He left unsaid, but clearly implied, that the core of the problem was that the US ambassador is a blowhard whose every far from secret word tends to substantiate the worst fears of these member states.

Malloch Brown also reminded the audience that the US and UN have been "constructively engaged, on Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and many other areas. This may have been a euphemism for "the UN doing what the US wanted," but in any case American demands on such questions tend to run into epistemological problems.

For example, Ambassador Bolton currently has to persuade the other members of the Security Council, whose votes he has dismissed as irrelevant, to make the UN that he thinks the US should quit, enforce international law, in which he does not believe, against Iran for non-existent breaches of a Nuclear Non-proliferation treaty that he himself had been trying to sabotage in his previous position as head of disarmament affairs at the State Department.

Of course Malloch Brown was not so crass as to name Bolton. The clever thing to do would have been to ignore the speech, but since Bolton has all the diplomatic skills of a Bull elephant on heat, he rose to the bait and angrily denounced the Deputy Secretary General, thus reinforcing the latter's credibility with the non-aligned delegations. The Ambassador angrily demanded a retraction from Kofi Annan. The Secretary General happily backed his deputy. I could almost imagine him saying, "I wished I had said that." We hope he will.

Knowing just how astute Malloch Brown is, one almost suspected him of planning just that reaction. "Objectively" it made him and Bolton part of a good cop/bad cop routine. However, even if Malloch Brown had planned it that way, and he denies it, no one would ever suspect Bolton of being part of such a sophisticated plot.

As Malloch Brown stated, US policy is "stealth" diplomacy and the UN's role, so assiduously worked for by Washington, is "in effect a secret in Middle America." And indeed, it is. Bolton's echo chamber in the Murdoch media, or "Fox and Rush Limbaugh" as he put it, have continually attacked the organization: not for its behavior, but for its existence.

It is perhaps typical of Bolton that he assumed that casting aspersions against Fox, Limbaugh and those who believe them was an attack on the American public.


There is one easy way to settle the question. Let Fox, or Limbaugh produce one positive story that they have done about the United Nations in the last five years.


The only thing wrong with Malloch Brown's speech is that it should have been made long, long ago. Six months ago he told me he would be out of the office on December 31st. He has certainly settled the question now, since his head will be the price for American support for any SG candidate.

We must hope that he will be equally forthright in the six months he has to go before then.

This is on the Nation website at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060626/iwilliams

Blair's blurred vison on US

The East is Redder

Last week, Tony Blair landed in Washington, possibly to discuss with Bush how a quick war on Iran might take people's minds off the debacle in Iraq. He should have stayed longer. There is nothing like living in America to heighten appreciation of Europe.

A year or so after Labour won office, a New Labour Minister met the New York Labour Party branch and asked what they saw as their role. The comrades told her that it was their fraternal duty to confiscate the rose-coloured glasses off visiting New Labour cabinet members as they landed at JFK, and not to return them until departure.
Clearly they failed with the Prime Minister, who consistently looks across the Atlantic for points of unsocialist emulation.

Reinforcing the point, recently there was a study that showed that British people were healthier - about ten years worth - than their American counterparts. It refrained from suggesting reasons. Diet and obesity were mentioned, but that is far from sufficient rationale for the better health of a nation whose gastronomic repertoire includes the chip butty and the fried Mars Bar. Indeed, if anything, the report understated the case, since for reasons of comparability it excluded minorities, who in the US are disproportionately poor, uninsured, and unhealthy,

In the end, two of the reasons suggested in the perplexed debaters in the US carried most conviction. One was that for more than half a century Britain has had a national health system, and let us emphasize system, since private medicine in the US does not provide the systematic and routine preemptive care of the British ante and post natal clinics and children's health model.

The other suggestion was that the disparity was a result of stress: even Americans with health insurance never know whether they will keep their jobs, and thus their insurance, or even their houses.

While on a public level most Americans treat poverty as a something that happens to others, usually because of their moral failings and fecklessness, on an instinctive level, they have, repeated election results notwithstanding, enough of a connection to the real world to know that poverty could indeed happen to them - and that there is only the flimsiest of safety nets between them and the gutter if catastrophe strikes.

Even the most progressive American employers cut off pay after a few weeks of sickness and most American workers have no recourse against unfair dismissal, unless they can prove racial or gender discrimination. That is narrowly defined. .One of the few progressive measures that Bill Clinton authored was unpaid maternity leave. Before then women could be sacked for having the temerity to take time off to give birth,

But even after this Clintonian great leap forward, the US remains the only industrial country in the world that has no provision for paid maternity leave.

In short, most Americans are a pay-cheque or two from catastrophe: lose a job, you lose health insurance. If you do not pay medical bills, your credit rating goes down the river and with it your claim to all the credit that the philanthropic Chinese are extending to the nation as a whole.

Even litigation can kill. As one lawyer I asked at the time of the O J Simpson case summarized - if you are rich and guilty, you want to be tried in America: if you are poor and innocent, in Europe.

The comparison with Britain is not an isolated one. Two years ago, a similar study showed that the average Hollander, who at the end of the war was much shorter than the average American, is now taller by several inches. The most convincing explanation was the success of the postwar Dutch welfare state.

Similarly glowing statistics, whether on health, rising living standards and even productivity per hour, come from most North West European states compared with the United States, it does really raise the question of why so many in the Blair government look to the USA for a model.

Perhaps it really is time for the remnants of the democratic socialists in the Labour Party to remember that Orwell predicted that democratic socialism would come into its own in Western Europe.

It is time for the soft left to stiffen up and decide that compared with the rest of the world, Europe is a worthy model. There are doubtless some recidivists out there in the party who are still fighting the Wilson-era wars against the European Union, but they should have learnt their lesson by now. Although the EU is a far from perfect institution, it is considerably more attractive than all the currently feasible alternatives. It is a safe bet that this government would have regressed even more towards an American model if we were not part of it.

The soft left should also be putting its democratic instincts to work. In the face of attempts to rip up recently won Human Rights protections, sending British citizens to vigilante justice in Texas, introducing identity cards and the other Big Brother proposals, surely it is time to give a cheer or two for democracy, not to mention fighting for the introduction of European style labour protection for British workers: freedom from unfair dismissal, union rights, pension rights and all the other measures on which New Labour has seen itself as the champion of the Confederation of British Industries against its own party and electoral base.

It is surely better to work with partners who see the benefits of social democracy (even Christian Democrats in Europe are far to the left of any American party) than to throw in our lot with an increasingly authoritarian, militaristic and theocratic state that only believes in Darwin when it comes to social relations.

No wonder the PM feels at home in Washington. A Prime Minister who admires Margaret Thatcher, took us into Iraq, wants faith-based schools funded by millionaire wannabe peers, wants to throw out the human rights act and introduce a new civil and military nuclear program without consultations, is indeed likely to be happy with a special, supine, transatlantic relationship. But it is certainly not, in its present form, an alliance that democratic socialists should cherish in preference to Europe.
A version of this appeared in Tribune, London, 26 May.

Blair Loses Boro's - Looses Bombs?

Blair losing boroughs in London may signal Britain loosing bombs over Bushehr in Iran.

Successive British governments have reduced the power of most city councils to the point that they probably envy the autonomy of the Iraqi government. But under cover of yesterday's local elections, Tony Blair's cabinet reshuffle may be moving the UK closer to yet another idiotic war at the behest of George W. Bush.

While some of the demotions in the cabinet shuffle were understandable because of the scandals surrounding the ministers being axed, Jack Straw, the foreign secretary had not been the focus of any headlines. That leaves the suspicion that he was axed because of the small print in what he has been telling the media. He had said that it was "inconceivable" for military operations against Iran.

If you check the ever-informative sound of silence, this is not something that the Prime Minister had been saying.

There is a poetic justice here. One of the reasons that Blair had sacked Robin Cook as foreign secretary was to remove an obstacle to his war plans over Iraq, and his successor, poor Jack Straw is now paying a similar price. A newly appointed minister, whether Straw, in the run-up to Iraq, or his successor Margaret Becket, in the run up to Iran, is not in a position to block the wishes of a Prime Minister who is so cocky and self assured that while firing others, has overlooked the one big cabinet change that could have restored Labour to popularity-his own resignation.

One cannot but help suspect that it is that arrogance which is costing him and the party so dearly. While there are nanny-state issues, like the identity cards Labour is introducing, which erode its popularity, and while it has dangerously alienated its own base in the unions and among workers, one of the interesting things about the results of the local elections is that Labour did not do nearly as badly as many people thought it may.

There are several reasons: one being an incompetent opposition-indeed, between the Liberal Democrats and the Tories, two incompetent oppositions. The other is that in the primary task of a government, Labour has done quite well in a social-democratic way. Almost everyone in Britain is better off, and what is more, the people in the formerly depressed industrial regions are much better off, not least because of major flows of government spending. For example, there is still not a single Tory councilor in Liverpool or Manchester.

Much of this is due to Chancellor Gordon Brown, who has managed to assuage the bankers while increasing state spending on traditional Labour objectives. But he has wisely stuck to his economic knitting, waiting for the blade to fall on his rival, Blair

He has not uttered a word against the war in Iraq, let alone against one in Iran, and in his own way he is as fond (or fondly delusional) about the special relationship with Washington as Tony Blair.

But aware of how unpopular George W. Bush is with the British electorate, not to mention Tony Blair, all Brown has to do is to keep his head down to be the beneficiary of Blair's overreaching if he joins in an attack on Iran.

Tourism and Tots To Save the World

St Lucia changed hands no less than fourteen times in the wars between the British and the French when its lush tropical climate and its volcanic soil produced the sugar and rum that were the economic equivalent of modern day oil. For centuries, the Caribbean was the equivalent of the Persian Gulf - the source of most of the North's wealth and a magnet for armies and fleets.

And then it was forgotten. Economically, if St Lucia had ended up with the French, its inhabitants could have been enjoying EU benefits and subsidies, like Martinique, visible across the Caribbean swell from the North of the island, which has almost three times the per capita GDP.

What it has left, is sun, sand, and some of the most beautiful scenery in the region – including the Marigot Bay location for the original Rex Harrison Dr Doolittle - and of course its people, who have included two Nobel prize-winners, Derek Walcott, the poet, and Sir Arthur Lewis, the economist who half a century ago developed "development" for the UN. (http://nobelprize.org/economics/laureates/1979/lewis-autobio.html)

Lewis's insights need updating. He compared the price of coffee to steel, because in those days, countries imported and exported tangible commodities. But in his native St Lucia, the sugar cane has gone, and following the American case at the WTO against the EU's banana preferences, this last major export crop is in danger as well. While for such a small island St Lucia has some successful manufacturing, almost half its income and its jobs now depend on tourists arriving with money to spend

For traditional economists and governments, this often seems an undignified way for a country to earn its living. But as one of George Bernard Shaw's characters once remarked, those that talk most about the dignity of labor are usually those that don't do any. There is no rush of jobseekers from the hotels and bars of the tourist resorts seeking backbreaking work in the cane-fields. In fact, British tourists alone take more money to developing countries than the government sends in aid and those tourist dollars, Euros and pounds usually go directly to locals and have less risk of being siphoned off by banks, consultants and politicians who stand ready to ambush aid money. In the case of St Lucia, each year there are over four visitors for each inhabitant, which could cause some culture clash, but the St. Lucians seem to take it in their stride.

As for the "Not-In-My-Back-Yard" syndrome, tourism developments usually bring better infrastructure, roads, power supplies, water and sewage plants to benefit the neighbors. It may be true that there is a certain percentage of tourists who are obnoxious, but that is infinitely preferable to having the more traditional accoutrements of development, a steel smelter, coalmine or nuclear power station in your backyard.

The UN recognized that recently when it accepted the World Tourism Organization as an affiliate, albeit with a slight name change, to UNWTO to distinguish itself from the unpopular World Trade Organization. As Kofi Annan recognized, "Tourism really has the potential of opening up economic space for people around the world. We should encourage tourist developers to go and set up tourist developments," he said pointing out the infrastructure development that comes in their train.

That is not to say that tourism is all wonderful, as anyone who has seen the coasts of Majorca or some parts of the Dominican Republic can testify. For example, cruise ships are usually owned by companies that are so offshored that they are almost extra-terrestrial, paying no taxes anywhere in the globe and ensuring that almost every last cent of the cruise dollars stays on board and off-shore rather than being spent in the islands they visit.

And then there are international resorts, which at least pay rent, taxes and wages in the resorts, and which more responsibly try to source as much as they can locally. What makes St Lucia stand out is that many of the hotels are locally owned. Last month, I was there taking advantage of Air Jamaica's new non-stop service from New York (www.airjamaica.com).

St Lucia's Rodney Bay epitomizes how development can work. Medium sized local hotels, like Coco Resorts, Bay Gardens and Village Inn, clustered around the famous harbor employ local people and send their guests to local attractions, such as La Soufriere, the active volcano, and the rainforest, where the Rain Forest Sky Rides chairlift allows what James Joyce would call a scrotum-tightening glide through the canopy of the forest.

Allen Chastanet, who used to work with Air Jamaica, has built the Coco Palm hotel (part of Coco Resorts), which typifies the local resourcefulness. Solar heating panels save imported fuel bills. Hotel wide internet keeps travelers connected, and arrangements with local restaurants and bars allow guests to sign for meals and drinks and pay with their hotel bill.

Local cuisine is Caribbean with a strong French influence and a definite level above the usual tourist destination fodder. To celebrate that, Chastanet and the other local hoteliers are arranging a Rum and Food Festival November 2-5, 2006 to balance the world famous St Lucia Jazz Festival, which also takes place nearby. I should declare an interest, I am helping to organize the Rum Festival-all in the interests of Caribbean development of course.

So has all this tourism and commercialism degraded the culture and society? Not at all. St Lucia now has a national health care plan, which, it is worth noting, makes it more developed than the United States in terms of access to hospital care. The revenue that makes that possible derives from tourism. You can go visit, and sink a tot, sure in the knowledge that you are helping development and the progress towards the Millennium Development Goals far more than your government-and enjoy yourself at the same time! Sir Arthur Lewis would approve-in spirit as it were.

The Deceased, Dubya and the Deranged.

Ours to Reason Why

On May Day next week, along with the more traditional observances of Spring and Socialism, we should pause to contemplate the anniversary of Bush's famous triumphalist landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln under the banner 'Mission Accomplished.'

Even three years after his hubristic landing and more than 2300 Americans and a hundred or so British six foot under, and approaching eighteen thousand wounded later, no one has yet produced a coherent and convincing reason for the invasion of Iraq.

The leader of a previous global empire, Lord Palmerston, said that only three people understood the Schleswig-Holstein problem: one of them was deceased, the other deranged, while he himself had forgotten it. When future historians come to consider the mystery of why the Iraq War happened, it is possible that George W. Bush may come up with a similar response, albeit, one suspects, without the mordant wit

I always regarded the blood oil hypothesis as somewhat simplistic, despite the Bush dynasty's Texan connections to the oil industry. As oil hit $75 a barrel this week, risking Republican control of Congress in the mid-term elections, even after pausing to consider the recent $400 million retirement package for the CEO of Exxon-Mobil, surely no one can believe that the administration intended such a mammoth global energy balls-up.

Breaking the law to enforce it does not really ring as a slogan. Kofi Annan quite rightly pointed out that the invasion was against international law. Although Iraq was indeed in breach of international law by refusing admittance to UN weapons inspectors, it is worthwhile remembering that the Occupiers have still not readmitted those inspectors even though the UN resolutions mandating cooperation with their work are still on the books. All the evidence suggests that Iraqi WMD's were an excuse, not a cause, for the invasion.

Then there is the human rights excuse. While Saddam Hussein was indeed tyrant he had been at his blood-thirstiest while he was a favoured ally of London and Washington. And any demand for historical justice should be set in the context of complete inaction over East Timor in the past, or indeed relative sloth over Darfur now.

It is certainly true that Israel itself and its US lobby, AIPAC, were pushing for war on Iraq, as indeed they are now against Iran. Ironically, while pro-Israeli pundits have lambasted the authors of a recent report on the Lobby for their 'anti-Semitic' chutzpah in saying this, AIPAC's own website claims corralling Saddam Hussein as one its major aims and achievements.

However, while AIPAC certainly helped create a favourable climate for the invasion of Iraq, there is no way that it could have forced such costly military action simply because it was good for Israel.

One of the reasons for the success of AIPAC and some other strongly supported foreign policy lobbies, like the Cuban exiles, is that few of the players in Congress or the voting booths have a direct interest in foreign policy, and even fewer could give a tinker's cuss for the opinions of the rest of world if they are not reflected in campaign cheques or votes.

In the case of Iraq, the Lobby was rowing with the current in the administration. The professional military had been ousted from the Pentagon by bellicose ideologues, and the White House was in a preemptive mode.

This leaves unanswered the question of why so many in the administration wanted a war. Even if Cheney and assorted NeoCons whispering in the Presidential ear that Saddam Hussein was an Arab, and so was Bin Laden, therefore Baghdad must have been behind September 11, could George W. Bush really be that stupid? Could he have been taken in by Karl Rove's handiwork in conflating the war on terror with war against Iraq?

Well, yes. But perhaps not in this case. Once again, this was an excuse, not a cause. Iraq was a pre-existing obsession waiting for the World Trade Centre to happen.

If we were to ask Bush the Palmerston question about the causes of the 'Iraqi question,' we know he is not deceased. That still leaves unanswered whether he is deranged, or has forgotten quite why we are at war.

Unlike President Reagan, he has no signs of Alzheimer's so we are left with the hypothesis that, if not exactly clinically deranged, the President is, as the phrase from the previous empire had it, not quite sixteen annas to the rupee.

Sadly, it seems most likely that twenty-four hundred Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis have died to exorcise George W. Bush's (deeply deserved) feelings of personal inadequacy. His father left school at 18 to fight, bravely, in World War II. Bush Jr. pulled every nepotistic string he had to get into the Texas Air National Guard in order to dodge the Vietnam War, and deserted before completing his term of service.

Since then he has worn unmerited quasi-military garb on his frequent visits to military bases, and in every way behaved like the wannabe military equivalent of a cowboy on a dude ranch. And a year after September 11 he told Texan Republicans about Saddam Hussein, 'that man tried to kill my dad.' It may not be a totally convincing explanation, but it makes more sense than some of the others. In the end, of course, like the war itself, it makes no sense at all.

Nuts indeed - but that's Dubya for you.

Nuking our Way to Non-Proliferation

It is not only Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov who is getting a sense of deja vu all over again. Until last week Deadline Pundit had been getting the type of funny looks previously reserved for the Ancient Mariner "Unhand me, grey-beard loon," when I suggested that there were high ups in Washington who were seriously planning military attacks on Iran.

And now it is out in the open, helped considerably by Seymour Hersh who is yet again saving the declining reputation of American journalism with his New Yorker piece. ( http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060417fa_fact ) Dan Plesch was in fact saying the same thing a month ago citing the Federation of American Scientists (see www.danplesch.net and www.fas.org) but because he did not say it in the New Yorker, no one noticed. But with Hersh's article. at last American mainstream reporters had a question to ask the administration, and the sound of silence was deafening. As far as I can see no White House or Pentagon spokesman categorically deny Hersh's premise.

British foreign secretary Jack Straw dismissed the idea as "completely nuts," which is, of course, true. It is also true that Jack has missed some very obvious salient facts including the dubious rationality of the White House, and indeed the insanity of the attack on Iraq. And once again, while Straw has been quite clear about his disapproval of military intervention, Tony Blair himself has been a noticeably reticent to disavow military action.

Straw, quite rightly, is pleading for diplomacy. However, you cannot have a diplomatic solution when the main protagonist, the US, refuses to talk to Iran, (ironically, except about Iraq) and is making plain that it wants to overthrow the regime.

This is more than contingency planning. It is clear that for some in the White House, almost certainly including Bush himself, the Iranian nukes, are just a McGuffin, a plot device to effect a regime change in Teheran, just as the Iraqi WMD's were in Baghdad. With mid-term elections impending, and Bush's popularity falling, the pressure will be for action this year. Watch out for implications that the problems of Iraq are all because of Iranian interference.

Equally ironically, in a week when there were near-libelous attacks on John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt for their Harvard paper on the Israel Lobby, the American Jewish Committee tried to put truth in the rumors by running a full-page ad in the Financial Times, implicitly calling for an attack on Iran.

The prospect of the US launching tactical nuclear strikes against Iran on behalf of the only nuclear power in the Middle East, in the name of nuclear non-proliferation, should at least waken the jaded sense of irony of other members of the Security Council.

The danger is that the Europeans, Russians and Chinese may, as they did over Iraq, take the administration's camouflage at face value, and help Bush and Blair get within diplomatic range of launching military operations to "enforce UN decisions."

They should be demanding an unequivocal repudiation of unilateral military action as an absolute prerequisite for any further support for diplomatic pressure on Iran.

Recess Appointment to the Human Rights Council?

It was very wise of the US not to run as a candidate for the new UN Human Rights Council. Even though the other members would have been unwise not to let the US win a seat, the resentment against John Bolton and the White House was probably too strong for delegates not to indulge themselves in the vindictive satisfaction of voting against Washington.

Once again, the old irony raises its rusty point. John Bolton had castigated the other members of the UN for allowing the new Council members to be elected by a simple majority rather than two thirds–which would have made it impossible, instead of just extremely difficult to get the US elected this year!

He also complained (correctly) that the resolution setting up the Council had no explicit bar to the usual type of UN General Assembly gerrymandering, where regional groups agree only to field the number of candidates for the number of seats.

But watch out for next year! When the US was voted off the budget committee, the ACABQ, last time, the British and others joined with them the following year to put the screws on New Zealand, which had defeated the US, to stand down. New Zealand did the noble thing and made way for the US, since it was told that the US would not pay the arrears if it were not represented. In this global Tammany Hall election, the US won with no opposition – and still did not pay the dues arrears. In similar fashion, the US lost an election to the Human Rights Commission in 2001, The US could only get 29 votes for one of the three seats, compared with France with 52 votes; Austria, 41; and Sweden, 32.

The following year, the US tried to get the WEOG group to adopt exactly the same rotation system for candidacies which other regional groups used to avoid elections, and which has resulted in human rights offenders getting on the Commission.

Failing in that, with its allies, it put heavy pressure on previously declared candidates Spain and Italy to withdraw in its favor, and in another triumph for democracy, the US was declared elected to the Commission without the tedious necessity for a vote.

We will almost certainly see some similar attempts for next year's elections for the Human Rights Council, which would be a really shameless invitation to other regional groups to do the same.

Buying Titles, Blair, Livingstone and Tuttle

O, wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!

Many Americans will be unaware of some recent developments that cast an interesting light on developments across the Atlantic. The elected mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, has rescued his city from being a perpetual traffic jam with his highly successful congestion charge on vehicles entering the centre. However, instead of being grateful for the easier access to the US embassy in Grosvenor Square, the US Mission refuses to pay since they regard it as a tax.

Livingstone said, with his customary colourful phrasing, "It would actually be quite nice if the American ambassador in Britain could pay the charge that everybody else is paying and not actually try and skive out of it like some chiselling little crook." Apart from the fact that H.E. Robert Tuttle was a Reagan appointee, is a car salesman on a large scale, and has now been appointed by George W. Bush, probably for being a major donor, we can say little about his character. But please see my Ermine for IOU's column from Tribune, below, for some transatlantic connections on people buying honours beyond their apparent merits. Tuttle has as much qualification for being diplomatic as Livingstone!

On another tangent, here in New York, every time a Mayor wants to play the xenophobic card, he turns on diplomats for parking fines, for which the assorted freeloaders also claim diplomatic immunity. Of course, the assorted diplomatic community are nothing compared with the hosts of New York police, Fire Department and other city officials who park with impunity across the crowded city.

While exhorting Mayor Bloomberg to follow London's example in order to make Manhattan habitable again, there is another group that should be considering following the Ambassador Robert Tuttle's example. Every time the diplomatic core ventures through the sundry toll tunnels, bridges and roads of New York, they should cite the US Ambassador to London as their guarantee of free passage, since the tolls are clearly every bit as much a tax as the congestion charge.

And now my Tribune column, 31 March 2006

Ermine For IOU's

The "Ermine for IOU's" scandal may look as it if were a flashback to Lloyd George's days, but that is not doing modernizing dynamic Tony Blair justice. I suspect that the inspiration is not the old Welsh womanizer, but his transatlantic reincarnation, Blair's old chum Bill Clinton.

In the good old days when John Smith was alive, Comrades Blair and Brown were passing through New York and met some of the leaders of the Labour International Branch there. Their totally uncritical admiration for Bill Clinton was disturbing. "Don't you realize that he would put his grandmother for sale on the streets to get votes," I remonstrated. "But he wins elections," came back the reply.

A reply of another sorts came a few weeks later when a Liverpool councillor and PPC called to ask if I had met Tony Blair on his recent visit to the States. It seemed that he had referred to a "wild man from Liverpool," he had met in New York who, he charged, had been "badmouthing Clinton." "Guilty as charged," I happily admitted.

It was Bill Clinton who castigated American unions as "Special Interest Groups," while raking in the cash from Wall Street donors. It was Bill Clinton who sold nights in the White House in return for big campaign cheques. It was the Clintons who essentially decided that the purpose of the Democratic Party was to re-elect Bill Clinton, so that he could promulgate the voodoo economics which George Bush senior regarded as too reactionary and inhuman for his more moderate conservative taste.

Of course George Bush Junior's toxic reign has now imbued Clinton's terms with a rosy retrospective glow, but in his two terms Clinton effectively managed to complete the destruction of what was left of the Democratic Party's democracy and reduce the organization to a PO box for corporate donations, confident that the party's supporters would not vote Republican no matter what the Democrats did.

In return for big cheques, American donors have traditionally expected Ambassadorships and similar prestige jobs. In American usage, Ambassadors keep their title on retirement, so it has all the social appurtenances of a life peerage. But they all expect results, as when a few hundred thousand dollars from a Cuban American magnate got Clinton to sign on for tightening the embargo, a few million from Hollywood got his government to fight the Germans on behalf of the Scientologists, and half a million from a banana magnate bought a trade war with the European Union.

The basis for the donor-driven politics of America is the primary election, where ambitious individuals raise money to win elections to win the candidacy for political parties. Originally the primaries were intended to rescue politics from the smoke-filled rooms of Tammany Hall. They have now taken it into halls of luxury hotels and very expensive fund raising dinners. Effectively, there is no membership of political party in any sense that anyone in Britain would have recognized ten years ago.

But now, what you see in Britain is what we had already got here in the States: dwindling party rolls as members decide that a party leadership that seems to pay no attention to what they want is not really worthwhile spending money or time on; alienated unions being sent to the tradesman's entrance of Number Ten while the more piratical captains of industry get the red carpet treatment at the front.

The resemblances go even deeper. Blair originally won his leadership campaign, the closest thing to a primary the Labour Party had ever had, with an expensive campaign paid for by a wealthy individual with little or no previous connection to the Party. And now, along with a peerage, Michael Levy is the financial engineer behind his client Tony Blair's bid for financial independence from the unions, not to mention a key determinant in Britain's Middle East policy. At least Levy's son in Israel is anti-Likud, but British policy has been more tolerant of Sharon's excesses than, shall we say, Robin Cook would ever have countenanced.

There is a strong case for entrepreneurs and business people sending money to the Labour Party. Labour is better for the economy than Thatcherism, and there is a long tradition of millionaires supporting the party, even if the first name that springs to mind, Robert Maxwell, evokes caution more than applause.

Several of the recent donors say they were told to keep their loans quiet, which suggests that Clintonian reasons were paramount. Like Clinton, Blair was wrestling with the problem of how to finance an election when so many of his autocratically decided policies ran counter to the principles of the traditional members and supporters of the party. He had already attenuated the Labour Conference from a decision making body to an American style convention, a circus to endorse and showcase the winner of the expensive primary election for Party leadership. Party branches were overtly encouraged to go into hibernation.

But the members were voting with their feet ad dropping out. Unions were finding better uses for their political funds than supporting a leadership that regarded them with a baleful Thatcherite glare and which actually boasted of having the most regressive labour laws in Europe. Hence a secret slush fund and with a leap and bound, Tony was free, free to ignore his own party on Iraq, education, and all of his other innovations.

However, there is a price for this. If the first stage, the party organization, is jettisoned during the launch of the Blair fan club into political orbit, what does it leave for his successor? One answer would be state funding, which would perpetuate the current leadership's independence from the party's electoral base, at least until the Tories get their act together.

Big cheques, whether from government or millionaires, are not conducive to grass roots democracy, nor to grassroots activism of the kind needed to rebuild Labour's base. It would be interesting to hear what aspirant party leaders have to say about rebuilding the party. If members are to be involved in the choice of the next leader, and in the next election, it would be useful if promising candidates started persuading disgusted former members to return, not least by promising to listen to them.

Road Map Has to Hit the Wall

Some clips for your amusement before thoughts on the Israeli elections

From the Ybor City International Rum and Cane Spirits festival, where we judges had to taste statistically different samples of over a 100 rums local TV clip

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=
-3986080021023162614&q=tampa+digital&pl=true

And for something completely different, a Weekend America radio segment on peace and quiet in the UN in the Meditation Room

http://weekendamerica.publicradio.org/programs/index_20060318.html

The Road Map Has to Go Through the Wall.

The Israeli Elections offer a mixed message. There is a clear majority of Israelis prepared to accept withdrawal of settlements. However, Olmert is a peacemaker the same way Sharon was. He does not want to deal with the Palestinians, and his unilateralism of his planned pullout is not based on the absence of a "partner" prepared to negotiate, but on the absence of a partner prepared to capitulate totally.

Somehow, he draws world applause for speaking of painful sacrifices, giving up "dear parts of the land of Israel." In case you missed the point, the "dear parts of Israel" he is giving up are, by near-unanimous opinion of the rest of the world, stolen properties: territory conquered by military force, whose inhabitants have been displaced.

Because of heavy demographic pressure, and mild diplomatic pressure, Olmert is in effect saying that we will hand back the pieces of stolen land that it is inconvenient to hold, but in return we will keep the best parts. For the Palestinians, it is the equivalent of someone squatting in a house and offering to let the owners live in the outhouse-under close supervision- if they give clear title to the main residence.

Even so, the election offers some hope. The application of pragmatism and realism about abandoning even some settlements has to be an improvement over an atavistic claim based a promise from a desert sky god to a mythical prophet. If there is no insuperable principle involved in giving up some settlements, then the road is open to pull out completely, in accordance with international law, back to the green line.

However, it is interesting to contrast the treatment of Ehud Olmert with that accorded to the new Palestinian government. For example, Secretary-General Kofi Annan emphasized before Hamas won the Palestinian elections, "It is the view of the Quartet that all members of a future Palestinian Government must be committed to non-violence, recognition of Israel, and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations, including the Road Map."

Have you heard anyone recently demand that all members of the present, let alone any future Israeli government must be committed to non-violence, recognition of a completely independent Palestinian State, and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations, including the Road Map?

As far as I am aware, no members of the Likud government had declared unequivocal acceptance of a Palestinian State, let alone committed themselves to resolution 242, and other UN resolutions on the issue.

It is possible that someone may have expressed regret for terrorist acts such as the assassinations of UN Envoy Count Folke Bernadotte, or the objectively pro-Nazi assassination of Lord Moyne during World War two, let alone for Deir Yasin. But if they did, it was not very loud or widely broadcast. (Ironically, since Moyne was the heir of the Guinness brewing empire, Hamas may even have approved of that one.)

In complete defiance of international law, let alone the Road Map, they have been busily changing the situation on the ground, expanding settlements at a breakneck speed and building the Wall in defiance of a ruling by the world's highest legal authority, the International Court of Justice. Olmert now confirms exactly the suspicions expressed by the ICJ, and wants this to be the future unilaterally decided border of Israel.

On a more contemporary note, the Israeli government continues incursions into the PA areas, with targeted killings and extensive collateral damage to ordinary civilians. Olmert proposes a pull out of civilian control, but leaving military control. In Vietnam, they had something similar. They called it a free fire zone.

The US government demanded that the PNA hand back $50 million in aid to stop it falling into the hands of a government that does not respect the Road Map. I would advise that no one hold their breath waiting for a demand from Washington for repayment by Israel of the $3 billion plus annual checks sent to an Israeli government that has effectively been ripping up the Road Map and laughing in the face of Washington's repeated, albeit progressively weakening, stipulations on settlement building.

If anyone would listen carefully, Hamas has been offering wiggle room. Both its theology and its populist politics in the refugee camps inhibit it from recognizing the 1948 boundaries as final, anymore than a theologically motivated Zionist would be prepared to abandon all claims, no matter how residual, to the whole of the Land of Israel. However Hamas is offering a long-term indefinite hudna, truce or ceasefire that in practical terms is close to recognition. The way to solidify that trend is not by refusing to talk to the new government, let alone by starving out the Palestinian electorate.

There is a firm basis of a settlement, which the Arab League has asked Hamas to subscribe to, and that is the Beirut declaration, which effectively enjoins both sides to accept the UN resolutions, the Green Line and mutual co-existence. By all means, pressure Hamas to accept it, but we have to be aware that the Israel right does not want a Palestinian negotiating partner. And its lobbying has the US back in the good old days when no one was allowed to talk to any of the Palestinians – in case they make a reasonable offer.

Olmert wants a capitulation, but the good news from the Israeli election is that a clear majority of Israelis have voted for a solution that involves abandoning settlements. Labor's Amir Peretz would rather see the poor looked after in Israel than care in the community for psychologically challenged ex-Brooklynites in the settlements. He knows that a genuine peace takes two sides, and that an imposed solution is a resented one.

If the rest of the Quartet applies some serious pressure to both governments, there is a serious prospect of removing the roadblock and the diversions that have been on the Road Map all this time.