United Nations
Using and Abusing the UN, Redux
On September 12, 2002, George W. Bush delivered a forceful address to the United Nations General Assembly to rally support for an American campaign against Iraq. Challenging the UN to enforce its own resolutions, Bush warned the assembled delegates that failure to back the US war against Iraq would condemn the institution to irrelevance. While the speech contained little that was new — most notably, it failed to offer the long-promised evidence of Iraqi nuclear weapons — it did succeed in returning the UN to the center of the developing US-Iraqi showdown. Bush received numerous plaudits, even among those who oppose war, mainly for the simple fact that he approached the UN at all.
The UN Arab Human Development Report
With great fanfare and evident satisfaction, the UN Development Program and the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development in June released the "Arab Human Development Report 2002" (AHDR). The Report, authored by a team of Arab scholars and policymakers with an advisory committee of "well-known Arabs in international public life," is the first UN Human Development Report devoted to a single region. Its release in Cairo was accompanied by a London press conference which received significant attention in the Western media.
How the Sanctions Hurt Iraq
(This article was updated on November 14, 2001.)
Running for Cover: The US, World Oil Markets and Iraq
Last week's panic within the Clinton Administration over a potential winter spike in heating oil prices has greatly eased, as oil prices have begun to fall. The Democrats' political planners feared that Republican candidate George W. Bush and voters would blame Clinton and Vice President Al Gore for failing to forestall the price rise that dominated the news for the last two weeks.
UNICEF Establishes Blame in Iraq
UNICEF'S recent reports on child mortality in Iraq provided ready fuel for the ongoing propaganda war over the future of sanctions. Iraq's representative at the UN has spoken of a "genocide" caused by sanctions while US and United Kingdom spokespersons, completely ignoring the sanctions' impact since 1990, have blamed Saddam's regime for Iraq's socio-economic decline.
“Sanctions Have an Impact on All of Us”
The following comments are excerpted from a speech delivered on Capitol Hill on October 6, 1998 by Denis Halliday, former UN humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, shortly after he resigned his post in protest over the sanctions’ devastating impact on the Iraqi people.
The Rise and Fall of the “Rogue Doctrine”
Since 1990, US military policy has been governed by one overarching premise that US and international security is primarily threatened by the “rogue states” of the Third World. These states — assumed to include Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea and Syria — are said to threaten US interests because of their large and relatively modern militaries, their pursuit of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and their hostile stance toward the United States and its allies. To counter this threat, current American strategy requires the maintenance of sufficient military strength to conduct (and prevail in) two Desert Storm-like operations simultaneously.
Alternatives to an International Criminal Court
A scene toward the end of the documentary film Calling the Ghosts shows two Muslim women from Bosnia, survivors of the Serbian concentration camp of Omarska, looking through a rack of postcards. They have come to The Hague to testify about their experiences at the war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The voiceover is one of the women reading what they wrote to their former Serbian colleagues in the now Muslim-free city of Prijedor: “Greetings from The Hague. Hope to see you here soon.” Those two short sentences speak volumes about modern ethnic hatred, genocidal violence and war crimes such as rape and torture, as well as the survivor spirit and demands for justice.
Legalism and Realism in the Gulf
In his State of the Union address in January 1998, President Clinton won thunderous applause for threatening to force Iraq “to comply with the UNSCOM regime and the will of the United Nations.” Stopping UN chemical and biological weapons inspectors from “completing their mission,” declared the president, defies “the will of the world.” In the next three weeks, the White House ordered a massive show of force in the Gulf. Even traditional hawks, however, realized that a bombing mission could undermine American hegemonic interests in the Gulf that are served by a continuation of the sanctions regime.
UN Impasse in the Western Sahara
In his January 1996 report on the UN operation in the Western Sahara, Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali expressed the Security Council’s “frustration…at the absence of even a reasonably clear indication of when the [referendum] process might come to an end.” This was one of Boutros-Ghali’s most candid official statements about an operation that, by most accounts, has gone awry. With a mandate to organize and conduct a referendum asking Sahrawis to choose either independence or integration into Morocco, the most important issue now confronting the UN mission is whether the referendum process, which began in September 1991, has already been so compromised that it no longer offers a realistic means for resolving the conflict.
