Beyond Munich:
The UN Security Council Helps Disarm a Prospective Further
Victim of U.S. Aggression
[*]
ZNet
March 31, 2007
by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson
Imagine that when Hitler was threatening to invade Poland, after
having swallowed Czechoslovakia—with the help of the Western
European powers' appeasement of Hitler at Munich in September
1938—the League of Nations imposed an arms embargo on Poland,
making it more difficult for the imminent victim to defend
itself, and at the same time suggested that Poland was the
villainous party. That didn’t happen back in 1939, but in a
regression from that notorious era of appeasement something
quite analogous is happening now.
Here is the United States, still fighting a
brutal war of conquest in Iraq, which it is now doing with UN
Security Council approval, with open plans and threats to
attack Iran and engage in “regime change,” gathering aircraft
carriers off the coast of Iran, already engaging in subversive
and probing attacks on the prospective target, and the UN
Security Council, instead of warning and threatening the
aggressor warns, threatens and imposes sanctions on the
prospective victim!
The way it works is that the United States stirs
up a big fuss, proclaiming a serious threat to its own national
security, and expressing its deep concern over another state's
flouting of Security Council resolutions or dragging its feet on
some point of order such as weapons inspections—we know how
devoted the United States and its Israeli client are to the rule
of law!
In the
Iraq
case, this noise was echoed and amplified in the media, often
splashed across headlines and drummed up in editorial
commentary. In turn, elite opinion in the
United States and
Britain coalesced around the beliefs (a)
that a WMD-related crisis really existed in
Baghdad
and (b) that it required the Security Council's special
attention. Straight through March 19-20 2003, Iraq, the
prospective target of a full-scale attack, decried the absurdity
of this U.S.-U.K. noise, and filed regular communiqués with the
Security Council and Secretary-General documenting the U.S.-U.K.
aerial strikes on its territory,[1] including the "spikes of
activity" period from September 2002 onward.[2]
The vast majority of the
world's states and peoples also
rejected the war propaganda—including the largely
voiceless U.S. public, where
in the weeks before the war, two-thirds of non-elite opinion
stood firmly behind multilateral approaches to defuse the
crisis, foremost of which was permitting the UN weapons
inspections to take their course.[3] But then, as now, pretty
much the entire world recognized the U.S.-U.K. hijacking of the
Security Council, and its strategic misdirection away from a
defense of the actual target of the threats (Iraq) onto the
execution of the policy of the states making those threats while
playing the role of Iraq's potential victims (the U.S. and
U.K.).
So the aggression planning proceeded
then and does now with the cooperation of the UN and
international community. In the
Iraq
case, the Security Council allowed itself to be bamboozled into
restarting the weapons-inspection process, accepting this as the
urgent matter, rather than the war-mobilization and threat of
aggression by the
United States
and its British ally. Although the Security Council did not vote
approval of the U.S.-British attack, it helped set it up by
inflating the Iraq threat and failing to confront the real
threat posed by the United States
and Britain.
Then, within two months after “shock and awe,” the Security
Council voted to give the aggressor the right to stay in
Iraq and manage its affairs,
thereby approving a gross violation of the UN Charter after the
fact.
Now, four years later, the Security Council has
outdone itself. Not only has it failed to condemn the U.S. and
Israeli threat to attack Iran—the threat itself a violation of
the UN Charter,[4] and one made ever-more real by the U.S.
invasions of neighboring Afghanistan and Iraq during this decade
alone, now followed by a huge U.S. naval buildup near Iran's
coast to levels not seen since the U.S. launched its war on Iraq
four years ago in what the New York Times just called a
"calculated show of force."[5] But even worse, the Council has
aided and abetted these potential aggressors by adopting three
resolutions in the past eight months under Chapter VII of the UN
Charter, each of which affirms that Iran's nuclear program is a
threat to international peace and security, and reserves for the
Council the right to take "further appropriate measures" should
Iran fail to comply—that is, should Iran not cave-in to U.S.
demands on exactly the terms demanded.[6]
Since July 31, the Council has demanded that
Iran “suspend all enrichment-related and reprocessing
activities, including research and development"[7]—despite the
fact that Iran's right to engage in these activities is
guaranteed under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear
Weapons.[8] Since December 23, it has identified the existence
of Iran's nuclear program with so-called "proliferation
sensitive nuclear activities"[9]—despite the fact that the
International Atomic Energy Agency has never shown Iran's
program to be engaged in any kind of activities other than
peaceful ones. Indeed, in the December 23 resolution, the
Council used the phrase "proliferation sensitive nuclear
activities" no fewer than eight different times to describe
Iran's nuclear program, the clear—and perfectly false—allegation
being that for Iran to do
research on and develop its
indigenous nuclear fuel capabilities places Iran in violation of
its NPT commitments.
But perhaps most egregious of all, the March 24
resolution prohibits Iran
from selling "any arms or related material" to other states or
individuals (par. 5), and calls upon all states "to exercise
vigilance and restraint" in the sale or transfer of a whole list
of weapons systems to
Iran, "in order to prevent a
destabilizing accumulation of arms…" (par. 6).[10] As the
editorial voice of The Hindu immediately recognized, the
first term is critical "not so much because the Islamic Republic
is a major vendor of weapons even to Hamas or Hizbollah but
because it gives the U.S. an excuse to intimidate or interdict
all Iranian merchant shipping under the guise of
'enforcement'."[11] Likewise with the second term, which, if
history is any guide, Washington
will interpret as a strict prohibition on weapons sales to
Iran, thus depriving the
potential victim, faced with attack by one or more nuclear
powers, of the right to obtain even non-nuclear means of self
defense. This of course has been a standard
U.S. tactic over many years, even against
puny victims—Guatemala
in 1954 and
Nicaragua in the 1980s,
among other cases. But now the
United States has succeeded in
getting the Security Council to help it impede the self-defense
of yet another target of aggression.
In this truly Kafkaesque case, the state targeted
for attack (Iran)
has been declared a threat to the peace by the Security Council,
at the behest of a serial
aggressor openly mobilizing
its forces to attack the
“threat.”[12]
It should be recognized that the treatment of Iran’s
nuclear program, and the Security Council’s cooperation in this
treatment, is the ultimate application of a global double
standard, enforced by an aggressive superpower now able to get
away with both hypocrisy and murder. Only the
United States
and its allies may possess nuclear weapons. They alone may
threaten to use nukes. They alone may improve their nukes and
delivery systems. Only client
states such as
Israel may remain outside the
NPT indefinitely and without penalty. The
United States
may ignore its NPT obligation to work toward nuclear
disarmament. It may even renege on its promise never to use
nukes against nuke-free states that
joined the NPT. But no matter. By sheer fiat-power, no
other state may acquire nukes without
U.S. consent. Nor as the case
of Iran shows
may a state engage in its "inalienable right" to use nuclear
energy for peaceful purposes unless
and until the
United States
approves.
We are in the midst of
a crisis within the post-war international system, as a
serial aggressor is now able to mobilize the Security Council,
tasked with the maintenance of international peace and security,
to declare the state that it threatens with war a menace to the
peace and to help the aggressor disarm its target. This carries
us beyond Munich.
---- Endnotes ----
* A shorter, standard op-ed length version of
this commentary was drafted and submitted very widely across the
major U.S.
print media—and
found to be 100 percent unpublishable.
1. For an extensive list of documents filed at the United
Nations by the Iraqi Government over the period August 29, 2001,
through March 26, 2003, see David Peterson, "No
Memo Required," ZNet, July 1, 2005.
2. See David Peterson, "'Spikes
of Activity'," ZNet, July 5, 2005; and David Peterson, "British
Records on the Prewar Bombing of Iraq," ZNet, July 6, 2005.
3. See Steven Kull et al.,
Americans on Iraq and the UN
Inspections, Program on International Policy
Attitudes, January 21-26, 2003.
4. See, e.g.,
Chapter I, Article 2: "All Members shall refrain in their
international relations from the threat or use of force against
the territorial integrity or political independence of any
state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of
the United Nat ions" (par. 4).
5. "USS
John C. Stennis Now Operating in Persian Gulf," Navy
Newsstand, March 27, 2007; "Russian
intelligence sees U.S. military buildup on Iran border," RIA
Novosti, March 27, 2007; and Michael R. Gordon, "U.S.
Opens Naval Exercise in Persian Gulf," New York Times,
March 28, 2007.
6. See
Chapter VII. —We believe
it essential to understand that for the Security Council to
adopt a resolution under Chapter VII of the UN Charter means
above all that either a threat t o the peace, a breach of the
peace, or an act of outright aggression has occurred.
Otherwise, there is no point to the Council's resort to its
Chapter VII functions and powers. Regardless of what the
Council's other members may believe about the import of the
Iran resolutions, their
assent to these resolutions grants an enormously powerful and
dangerous tool of coercion to the
United States.
7.
Resolution 1696, July 31, 2006, par. 2.
8. See the
Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, the
Preamble, and Articles I, II, and IV.
9.
Resolution 1737, December 23, 2006, par. 2.
10.
Resolution 1747, March 24, 2007, par. 5, par. 6.
11. "Stepping
towards the precipice," Editorial, The Hindu, March
27, 2007.
12. See Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, "Hegemony
and Appeasement: Setting Up the Next U.S.-Israeli Target (Iran)
For Another 'Supreme International Crime'," ZNet, January
27, 2007.
[Edward S. Herman is an economist and media
analyst, co-author with Noam Chomsky of Manufacturing Consent;
David Peterson is a Chicago-based researcher and journalist.]
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