For 67 years the US has pursued its own interests at the expense of
global justice – no wonder people are sceptical now
by George Monbiot
You could almost pity these people. For 67 years successive US
governments have resisted calls to reform the UN security council.
They've defended a system which grants five nations a veto over world
affairs, reducing all others to impotent spectators. They have abused
the powers and trust with which they have been vested. They have
collaborated with the other four permanent members (the UK, Russia,
China and France) in a colonial carve-up, through which these nations
can pursue their own corrupt interests at the expense of peace and
global justice.
Eighty-three times the US has exercised its veto. On 42 of these
occasions it has done so to prevent Israel's treatment of the
Palestinians being censured. On the last occasion, 130 nations
supported the resolution but Barack Obama spiked it. Though veto
powers have been used less often since the Soviet Union collapsed in
1991, the US has exercised them 14 times in the interim (in 13 cases
to shield Israel), while Russia has used them nine times. Increasingly
the permanent members have used the threat of a veto to prevent a
resolution being discussed. They have bullied the rest of the world
into silence.
Through this tyrannical dispensation – created at a time when other
nations were either broken or voiceless – the great warmongers of the
past 60 years remain responsible for global peace. The biggest weapons
traders are tasked with global disarmament. Those who trample
international law control the administration of justice.
But now, as the veto powers of two permanent members (Russia and
China) obstruct its attempt to pour petrol on another Middle Eastern
fire, the US suddenly decides that the system is illegitimate. Obama
says: "If we end up using the UN security council not as a means of
enforcing international norms and international law, but rather as a
barrier … then I think people rightly are going to be pretty skeptical
about the system." Well, yes.
Never have Obama or his predecessors attempted a serious reform of
this system. Never have they sought to replace a corrupt global
oligarchy with a democratic body. Never do they lament this injustice
– until they object to the outcome. The same goes for every aspect of
global governance.
Obama warned last week that Syria's use of poisoned gas "threatens to
unravel the international norm against chemical weapons embraced by
189 nations". Unravelling the international norm is the US president's
job.
In 1997 the US agreed to decommission the 31,000 tonnes of sarin, VX,
mustard gas and other agents it possessed within 10 years. In 2007 it
requested the maximum extension of the deadline permitted by the
Chemical Weapons Convention – five years. Again it failed to keep its
promise, and in 2012 it claimed they would be gone by 2021. Russia
yesterday urged Syria to place its chemical weapons under
international control. Perhaps it should press the US to do the same.
In 1998 the Clinton administration pushed a law through Congress which
forbade international weapons inspectors from taking samples of
chemicals in the US and allowed the president to refuse unannounced
inspections. In 2002 the Bush government forced the sacking of José
Maurício Bustani, the director general of the Organisation for the
Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. He had committed two unforgiveable
crimes: seeking a rigorous inspection of US facilities; and pressing
Saddam Hussein to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention, to help
prevent the war George Bush was itching to wage.
The US used millions of gallons of chemical weapons in Vietnam, Laos
and Cambodia. It also used them during its destruction of Falluja in
2004, then lied about it. The Reagan government helped Saddam Hussein
to wage war with Iran in the 1980s while aware that he was using nerve
and mustard gas. (The Bush administration then cited this deployment
as an excuse to attack Iraq, 15 years later).
Smallpox has been eliminated from the human population, but two
nations – the US and Russia – insist on keeping the pathogen in cold
storage. They claim their purpose is to develop defences against
possible biological weapons attack, but most experts in the field
consider this to be nonsense. While raising concerns about each
other's possession of the disease, they have worked together to
bludgeon the other members of the World Health Organisation, which
have pressed them to destroy their stocks.
In 2001 the New York Times reported that, without either Congressional
oversight or a declaration to the Biological Weapons Convention, "the
Pentagon has built a germ factory that could make enough lethal
microbes to wipe out entire cities". The Pentagon claimed the purpose
was defensive but, developed in contravention of international law, it
didn't look good. The Bush government also sought to destroy the
Biological Weapons Convention as an effective instrument by scuttling
negotiations over the verification protocol required to make it work.
Looming over all this is the great unmentionable: the cover the US
provides for Israel's weapons of mass destruction. It's not just that
Israel – which refuses to ratify the Chemical Weapons Convention – has
used white phosphorus as a weapon in Gaza (when deployed against
people, phosphorus meets the convention's definition of "any chemical
which through its chemical action on life processes can cause death,
temporary incapacitation or permanent harm").
It's also that, as the Washington Post points out: "Syria's chemical
weapons stockpile results from a never-acknowledged gentleman's
agreement in the Middle East that as long as Israel had nuclear
weapons, Syria's pursuit of chemical weapons would not attract much
public acknowledgement or criticism." Israel has developed its nuclear
arsenal in defiance of the non-proliferation treaty, and the US
supports it in defiance of its own law, which forbids the disbursement
of aid to a country with unauthorised weapons of mass destruction.
As for the norms of international law, let's remind ourselves where
the US stands. It remains outside the jurisdiction of the
International Criminal Court, after declaring its citizens immune from
prosecution. The crime of aggression it committed in Iraq – defined by
the Nuremberg tribunal as "the supreme international crime" – goes not
just unpunished but also unmentioned by anyone in government. The same
applies to most of the subsidiary war crimes US troops committed
during the invasion and occupation. Guantánamo Bay raises a finger to
any notions of justice between nations.
None of this is to exonerate Bashar al-Assad's government – or its
opponents – of a long series of hideous crimes, including the use of
chemical weapons. Nor is it to suggest that there is an easy answer to
the horrors in Syria.
But Obama's failure to be honest about his nation's record of
destroying international norms and undermining international law, his
myth-making about the role of the US in world affairs, and his
one-sided interventions in the Middle East, all render the crisis in
Syria even harder to resolve. Until there is some candour about past
crimes and current injustices, until there is an effort to address the
inequalities over which the US presides, everything it attempts – even
if it doesn't involve guns and bombs – will stoke the cynicism and
anger the president says he wants to quench.
During his first inauguration speech Barack Obama promised to "set
aside childish things". We all knew what he meant. He hasn't done it.
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