Re: Re: Spinoza on international government

["Ian Murray" <seamus2001@xxxxxxxx>]

[Serendipity and quite apropos]

Published on Friday, August 17, 2001 in the Toronto Star
It's Not Bush Making Real Decisions in Oval Office
by Gwynne Dyer

It's perfectly all right for the U.S. to slap the rest of the world in
the face if the rest of the world is wrong, or just to defend its own
vital national interests. But it should be done for national
interests, not private ones, and it should be done in ways that cause
the least possible offence. That is not what's happening now.

Consider only the past month. In the second week of July, the Bush
administration told Congress that its ballistic missile defence
project would "bump up against" the constraints of the 1972
Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty "within months." Never mind that it's a
stupid idea; just look how it's being done. The ABM treaty allows
either party to withdraw unilaterally on six months' notice, but no
such notice has been given. The U.S., it appears, is just going to
breach the treaty illegally.

In the third week of July, a U.N. conference aimed at curbing the
global trade in small arms was effectively wrecked by U.S.
negotiators. The United States, which produces more than half of the
world's small arms, took a lone stand in blocking any restrictions on
private gun ownership and vetoed an African-backed proposal to ban
arms sales to "non-state actors" (i.e. the guerrilla groups that are
ravaging so many African countries). "The U.S. should be ashamed,"
said South African envoy Jean Du Preez.

In the same week, 160 countries meeting at Bonn agreed on the final
terms of the Kyoto treaty to combat global warming despite fierce U.S.
opposition (and the lead American negotiator was booed by the
assembled diplomats at the close).

A subtler obstructionism might have achieved the U.S. government's
goal of stalling the treaty for a couple of years, until U.S. industry
was ready to compete in the non-fossil fuel energy markets that will
expand rapidly to enable the treaty's signatories to meet their
emission reduction targets. Instead, the Bush administration's clumsy
defiance of world opinion annoyed everybody else so much they
confounded Washington's expectations: They went ahead and signed the
treaty anyway.

So the new energy markets will open up sooner rather than later, and
non-U.S. energy companies will reap the new global opportunities.
Moreover, the international emissions trading exchange that would
naturally have been based in the U.S. will probably be located in
London instead.

Late in July, it was the turn of the 1972 treaty outlawing germ
warfare. For six years, 56 countries have been negotiating a
supplementary treaty that would create verification rules and
international inspectors to enforce what was previously just a pious
pledge not to produce biological weapons.

Fifty-five of those countries had agreed on a 200-page draft
protocol - and suddenly, on July 25, the U.S. declared that it could
not agree since U.S. pharmaceutical plants would be open to inspection
under the treaty. Everybody else's plants would be open, too, and this
kind of inspection was foreseen from the beginning of the
negotiations, but suddenly U.S. concerns for commercial secrecy
outweighed everything else.

And so it goes. Early this month Thomas Novotny, the lead U.S.
negotiator for the past decade on the Framework Convention on Tobacco
Control, suddenly resigned his post. He is not returning calls, but
colleagues say that it was over frustration at the sudden U.S. switch
from a policy that sought to restrict cigarette advertising and
marketing to one that basically echoes the tobacco industry's
positions.

In part, this dismal record is merely an intensification of a trend
toward U.S. hostility to international law that was already marked
under the last administration. It was not Bush who refused to sign the
treaty banning anti-personnel mines, or tried to strip the
International Criminal Court of any real powers, or began the U.S.
campaign to sabotage the Kyoto accord. It was that hero of
internationalism, Bill Clinton.

The notion that international treaties and international law are by
their very nature disadvantageous for the United States, which as the
richest and most powerful country can simply enforce its wishes unless
treaties and laws get in the way, has spread far beyond the ideologues
of the far right who first articulated it in the early '90s. It now
has a major impact on the Pentagon's thinking, and is an
unexceptionable concept in Republican circles.

Much of America's current wrecking of international treaties would be
happening whoever the president was. What is puzzling is the maladroit
tactics with which it is being done. Official Washington is full of
clever operators whose specialty is getting what the boss wants while
spreading the blame and muddying the waters so that the naked
self-interest at the bottom of it all is not easily visible. But their
skills are not being used.

On the contrary, it's as if every bureaucratic or industrial interest
group with access to the Bush administration gets to make policy for
its own bit of the picture. Nobody is trying to cover their tracks, or
transfer the blame, or minimize the fallout from unpopular U.S.
actions like the attack on the Kyoto treaty. Nobody is even
co-ordinating the tactics, let alone imposing a common strategic
vision.

It strengthens the suspicion that George W. Bush is largely a
non-executive president and that the real decisions are being made at
a lower level - a level where co-ordination is difficult, special
interests loom large and nobody worries much about the cumulative
effect of all these separate actions.