[A-List] Beyond Munich

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The UN Security Council Helps Disarm a Prospective Further Victim 
of US Aggression {*}

by  and David Peterson

ZNet Commentary (April 02 2007)


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
US-UK noise, and filed regular communiques with the Security Council and
Secretary General documenting the US-UK 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 US 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 US-UK 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 US and UK).

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 US-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 US and Israeli threat to attack Iran - the threat itself a
violation of the UN Charter, {4} and one made ever-more real by the US invasions
of neighboring Afghanistan and Iraq during this decade alone, now followed by a
huge US naval buildup near Iran's coast to levels not seen since the US 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 US 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 (paragraph
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" (paragraph 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 US 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 US 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 US 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

* The authors would like it understood that a shorter, standard op-ed length
version of this commentary was drafted and submitted very widely across the
major US 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 05 2005, ; and David
Peterson, "British Records of Prewar Bombing of Iraq", ZNet, July 06 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, for example, 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 Nations" (paragraph 4).

5. "USS John C Stennis Now Operating in Persian Gulf", Navy Newsstand, March 27
2007; "Russian intelligence sees US military buildup on Iran border", RIA
Novosti, March 27 2007; and Michael R Gordon, "US Opens Naval Exercise in
Persian Gulf", New York Times, March 28 2007.

6. See Chapter VII, & lt; http://www.un.org/aboutun/charter/chapter7.htm . 
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 to 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, paragraph 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, paragraph 2.

10. Resolution 1747, March 24 2007, paragraph 5, paragraph 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 US-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.


http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2007-04/02herman-peterson.cfm


http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com
http://www.ashisuto.co.jp