There is one rule for Iraq and another for the rest of the world when it comes to UN Security Council resolutions
The retired director of the Central Intelligence Agency, James Woolsey, understands well the arrangement between the United Nations and Iraq. “This is a brief pause at best.”
The United States will bomb Iraq, and Britain will follow. Meanwhile, both countries are using the extra time to prepare their publics. Americans have shown themselves – in public opinion polls and at the CNN Town Meeting in Columbus, Ohio – insufficiently conditioned for American military adventures. Sixties child Clinton does not want a repetition on a national scale of the antiwar demonstration in Columbus that the ABC correspondent, Sam Donaldson, called “the type of vocal protest not heard since Vietnam”. So quiet had the American public become since the choppers evacuated Saigon that politicians tended to ignore them.
It’s porky-pie time in Washington, and the Littlefields are baking them in abundance. The Littlefields are offspring of Howard Littlefield PhD, publicity counsel of the Zenith Street Traction Company in Sinclair Lewis’ novel Babbitt:
“He could, on ten hours’ notice, appear before the board of aldermen or the state legislature and prove absolutely, with figures all in rows and with precedents from Poland and New Zealand, that the street-car company loved the Public and yearned over its employees; that all its stock was owned by Widows and Orphans; and that whatever it desired to do would benefit property-owners by increasing rental values, and help the poor by lowering rents.”
The Littlefields have been working overtime since Kofi Annan’s return from Baghdad. America’s paper of record, the New York Times, set the tone. Serge Schmemann and Douglas Jehl reported that many Arabs saw an inconsistency in enforcing United Nations resolutions in Iraq, but not in Israel. This apparent anomaly was also noted in Columbus, Ohio, and elsewhere in the American heartland. But the Times put the facts on the record: “The parallel is untenable, not least because Israel is not demonstrably in violation of UN Security Council decrees.”
The corrections editor of the New York Times the next day appears to have missed the fact that, between 1948 and 1996, Israel violated at least 50 UN Security Council resolutions. This excludes borderline resolutions, like number 57 of 1948, which deplored “the assassination of the UN Mediator in Palestine, Count Folke Bernadotte, in Jerusalem by a criminal group of terrorists”. The group were the Stern Gang, who became members of the coalition known as the Likud, whose leader now governs Israel. There is nothing equivocal, however, about Resolution 89 of 1950 calling on Israel to repatriate “thousands of Palestinian Arabs” it had expelled; or 237 of 1967 that “calls upon the government of Israel to ensure the safety, welfare and security of the inhabitants of the areas where military operations have taken place and to facilitate the return of those inhabitants who have fled the areas since the outbreak”; or 267 of 1969 that insists “acquisition of territory by military force is inadmissible”; or 425 of 1978 that demands Israel “withdraw forthwith its forces from all Lebanese territory”; or 452 of 1979 that “calls upon the government and people of Israel to cease, on an urgent basis, the establishment, construction and planning of settlements in the Arab territories occupied since 1967”. There are 45 more on illegal land expropriation, violation of the Geneva Conventions, expulsions of civilians, demolition of houses, violating the sovereignty of Tunisia and other states by attacking them without provocation and allowing armed settlers to harass the indigenous population. The list would be longer if the United States had not vetoed so many more.
Clearly, the poor Arabs, and probably Americans uneducated by the Council on Foreign Relations, need more Littlefields to explain the distinction between types of UN resolutions. Those on Iraq must be enforced, and those referring to Israel must not. Seems simple to me, but then I went to university.
Littlefield has to get out to Ohio and explain another new theory of international law. Enunciated by the New Republic, the voice of American liberalism, it is: “The US has every right to strike, whenever and wherever it wishes.” Clinton may have been reading this in the hours before he announced: “The US and hopefully all our allies have the unilateral right to respond any time and in any manner of our own choosing.” Until now, nothing in international law permitted unilateral action by the United States. In fact, the UN charter defines the use of military force outside one’s borders as aggression. The US helped to write the charter. Perhaps no one expected it to apply to the US. I’ll have to ask Dr Littlefield.
The New York Times published another classic Littlefieldism that I hope Philip Knightley will include in the next edition of The First Casualty: “MiG fighters, each carrying 250 gallons of microbes, were to be flown by remote control to release anthrax over Israel.” Anyone who has seen a MiG flown by remote control, please contact the editors of Jane’s Weapons Systems, who have no record of one. Makes one wonder how that military and technological genius Saddam Hussein managed to lose two wars.
Alan Simpson, whose last visit to Iraq with Senator Bob Dole before the invasion of Kuwait assured Saddam Hussein of American support, recently chaired a meeting at Harvard University on bombing Iraq. Two retired generals spoke against bombardment, but the liberal academics demanded military action. One former journalist said the problem was that Iraq’s propaganda apparatus was so effective the US had to counter it. So, Little field, get to work.
In Britain, the Foreign Secretary is doing his own Littlefielding. He told John Lloyd in these pages last week: “He [Saddam] used mustard gas repeatedly and used cyanide gas and nerve agents when he bombed Kurdish towns and killed thousands – mainly women and children. These are weapons not of military use but of terror. Here is the link between our opposition to Iraq and an ethical base to foreign policy.” The Times had done its bit, quoting a Defence Department dossier’s warning that “if he [Saddam] were to achieve a 100 per cent efficient delivery system, one teaspoonful of anthrax could kill 100 million people”. The maximum dispersal of anthrax, based on a leak in the Soviet Union in 1979, is 50 kilometres. There is no circle of 50 kilometres in the Middle East that contains 100 million people.
Littlefield faces an uphill task when people point out that Turkey, America’s friend, is murdering and dispossessing Kurds on a Saddam-like scale. It just closed a newspaper and put a journalist, Haluk Gerger, in prison for two years for merely writing about it. Others note that the Algerian government is involved in massacring “its own citizens”, just like Saddam. Israel has weapons of mass destruction, just like Saddam. Unlike Saddam, it has nuclear weapons and has kept one of “its own citizens”, Mordechai Vanunu, in solitary confinement for 11 years for publicising the fact. Others, notably in Columbus, had the bad taste to mention Indonesia and Suharto’s massacre, using American and British arms, of a quarter of a million East Timorese.
Dr Littlefield calls on us to forget the United Nations, international law and the Iraqis who will die. Trust Bill Clinton. Remember: “The United States is the only nation in which the government is a Moral Ideal and not just a social arrangement.” Who said that? Actually, it was Howard Littlefield, on page 130 of the 1922 edition of Babbitt.
