Some Final Thoughts
………
Alexander Cockburn
FIRST, I THINK the left needs to get a lot more hard-eyed about what the actual function of the UN is.
Nikita Khrushchev wrote in his incomparable memoirs that Soviet admirals, like admirals everywhere, loved battleships, because they could get piped aboard in great style amid the respectful hurrahs of their crews. It's the same with the UN, now more than ever reduced to the servile function of after-sales service provider for the United States, on permanent call as the mop-up brigade. It would be a great step forward if several big Third World nations were soon to quit the United Nations, declaring that it has no political function beyond ratifying the world's present distasteful political arrangements.
The trouble is that national political elites in pretty much every UN-member country – now 191 in all – yearn to live in high style for at least a few years, and in some cases for decades, on the Upper East side of Manhattan and to cut a dash in the General Assembly. They have a deep material stake in continuing membership, even though in the case of small, poor countries the prodigious outlays on a UN delegation could be far better used in some decent domestic application, funding orphanages or local crafts back home.
Barely a day goes by without some Democrat piously demanding “an increased role” for the UN in whatever misadventure for which the U.S. requires political cover. Howard Dean built his candidacy on clarion calls for the UN's supposedly legitimizing assistance in Iraq. Despite the political history of the nineties many leftists still have a tendency to invoke the UN as a countervailing power. When all other argument fails they fall back on the International Criminal Court, an outfit that should by all rights have the same credibility as a beneficial institution as the World Bank or Interpol.
On the issue of the UN, I can boast a record of matchless consistency. As a toddler I tried to bar my father's exit from the nursery of our London flat when he told me he was leaving for several weeks to attend, as diplomatic correspondent of the Daily Worker, the founding conference of the UN in San Francisco. Despite my denunciation of all such absence-prompting conferences (and in my infancy there were many), he did go.
He wrote later in his autobiography, Crossing the Line, that
[t]he journey of our special train across the Middle West was at times almost intolerably moving. Our heavily laden special had some sort of notice prominently displayed on its sides indicating it was taking people to the foundation meeting of the United Nations. From towns and lonely villages all across the plains and prairies, people would come out to line the tracks, standing there with the flags still flying at half-mast for Roosevelt on the buildings behind them, and their eyes fixed on this train with extraordinary intensity, as though it were part of the technical apparatus for the performance of a miracle …. On several occasions I saw a man or woman solemnly touch the train, the way a person might touch a talisman.
It was understandable that an organization aspiring to represent All Mankind and to espouse Peace should have excited fervent hopes in the wake of a terrible war, but the fix was in from the start, as Peter Gowan reminds us in a spirited essay in New Left Review for November/December 2003. The Rooseveltian vision was for an impotent General Assembly with decision-making authority vested in a Security Council without, in Gowan's words, “the slightest claim to rest on any representative principle other than brute force,” and of course dominated by the United States and its vassals. FDR did see a cosmopolitan role for the UN; not so Truman and Acheson who followed Nelson Rockefeller's body-blow to the nascent UN when, as assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs, the latter brokered the Chapultepec Pact in Mexico City in 1945, formalizing U.S. dominance in the region through the soon-to-be familiar regional military-security alliance set up by Dean Acheson in the next period.
These days the UN has the same restraining role on the world's prime imperial power as did the Roman Senate in the fourth century AD, when there were still actual senators spending busy lives bustling from one cocktail party to another, intriguing to have their sons elected quaestor and so forth, deliberating with great self-importance and sending the Emperor pompous resolutions on the burning issues of the day.
For a modern evocation of what those senatorial resolutions must have been like, read the unanimous Security Council resolution on October 15, 2003, hailing the U.S.-created “Governing Council of Iraq,” and trolling out UN-speak to the effect that the Security Council “welcomes the positive response of the international community to the establishment of the broadly representative council”; “supports the Governing Council's efforts to mobilize the people of Iraq”; “requests that the United States on behalf of the multinational force report to the Security Council on the efforts and progress of this force.” Signed by France, Russia, China, UK, U.S., Germany, Spain, Bulgaria, Chile, Mexico, Guinea, Cameroon, Angola, Pakistan and Syria. As Gowan remarks, this brazen twaddle evokes “the seating of Pol Pot's representatives in the UN for fourteen years after his regime was overthrown by the DRV.”
Another way of assaying the UN's role in Iraq is to remember that it made a profit out of its own blockade and the consequent starvation of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi babies in the 1990s. As a fee for its part in administering the “Oil-for-Food” Program, the UN helped itself to two per cent off the top. (On more than one account members of the UN-approved Governing Council, whose most conspicuous emblem was the bank looter Ahmad Chalabi, were demanding a far heftier skim in the present looting of Iraq's national assets.)
Two months before the October 2003 resolution, the U.S.'s chosen instrument for selling the Governing Council, UN Special Envoy Vieira de Mello, was blown up in his office in Baghdad by persons with a realistic assessment of the function of the UN. Please, my friends, no more earnest calls for “a UN role,” at least not until the body is radically reconstituted along genuinely democratic lines. As far as Iraq is concerned, all occupying forces should leave, with all contracts concerning Iraq's national assets and resources written across the last nine months repudiated, declared null and void, illegal under international covenant.
And finally, there is the matter of imperial motive. So why did the U.S. want to invade Iraq in 2003 and finish off Saddam? There are as many rationales as there were murderers on Christie's Orient Express. In the end my mind goes back to something my friend the political scientist Doug Lummis wrote from his home in another outpost of the Empire, in Okinawa at the time of the first onslaught on Iraq at the start of the nineties.
Iraq, Lummis wrote, had been in the eighties a model of an oil-producing country thrusting its way out of the Third World, with its oil nationalized, a good health system, and an efficient bureaucracy cowed from corrupt practices by a brutal regime. The fundamental intent of the prime imperial power was to thrust Iraq back, deep and ever deeper into Third-World indigence, and of course to re-appropriate Iraq's oil.
In the fall of 2003 I was in London and for a weekend enjoyed the hospitality of the first-class journalist Richard Gott, also of his wife Vivienne. At one point our conversation turned to this question of motive, and I was interested to hear Gott make the same point as Lummis, only about the attack of 2003. I asked him why he thought this, and Gott recalled a visit he'd made to Baghdad in the very early spring of 2003.
This was a time when the natural and political inclination of most opponents of the impending war was to stress the fearful toll of the sanctions imposed from 1990 onwards. Gott had a rather different observation, in part because of his experience in Latin America. Baghdad, he said, looked a lot more prosperous than Havana. “It was clear today,” Gott wrote after his visit, “from the quantity of goods in the shops, and the heavy traffic jams in the urban motorways, that the sanctions menace has been effectively defeated. Iraq is awakening from a long and depressing sleep, and its economy is clearly beginning to function once more. No wonder it is in the firing line.”
Eyes other than Gott'
s no doubt observed the same signs of economic recovery. Iraq was rising from the ashes, and so, it had to be thrust down once more. The only “recovery” permitted would be on Uncle Sam's terms. Or so Uncle Sam, in his arrogance, supposed.
Then, in January 2004, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill disclosed that George Bush had come into office planning to overthrow Saddam Hussein. MSNBC promptly polled its audience with the question, “Did O'Neill betray Bush?”
Was that really the big question? The White House had a sharper nose for the real meat of Leslie Stahl's 60 Minutes interview with O'Neill and Ron Suskind, the reporter who based much of his exposé of the Bush White House, The Price of Loyalty, on 19,000 government documents O'Neill provided him.
What bothered the White House is one particular National Security Council document shown in the 60 Minutes interview, clearly drafted in the early weeks of the new administration, which showed plans for the post-invasion dispersal of Iraq's oil assets among the world's great powers, starting with the major oil companies.
For the brief moment it was on the TV screen one could see that this bit of paper, stamped “Secret,” was undoubtedly one of the most explosive documents in the history of imperial conspiracy. Here, dead center in the camera's lens, was the refutation of every single rationalization for the attack on Iraq ever offered by George W. Bush and his co-conspirators, including Tony Blair.
That NSC document told 60 Minutes's vast audience the attack on Iraq was not about national security in the wake of 9/11. It was not about weapons of mass destruction. It was not about Saddam Hussein's possible ties to Osama bin Laden. It was about stealing Iraq's oil, the same way the British stole it three quarters of a century earlier. The major oil companies drew up the map, handed it to their man George, helped him (through such trustees as James Baker) steal the 2000 election, and then told him to get on with the attack.
O'Neill said that the Treasury Department's lawyers okayed release of the document to him. The White House, which took 78 days to launch an investigation into the outing of Valerie Plame as a CIA officer, clearly regarded the disclosure of what Big Oil wanted as truly reprehensible, as opposed to endangering the life of Ms. Plame.
Forget about O'Neill “betraying” Bush. How about Bush lying to the American people? It's obvious from that document that Bush, on the campaign trail in 2000, was as intent on regime change in Iraq as was Clinton in his second term and as Gore was publicly declaring himself to be.
Here's Bush in debate with Gore October 3, 2000:
If we don't stop extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions, then we're going to have a serious problem coming down the road. I'm going to prevent that.
The second quote is from a joint press conference with Tony Blair on January 31, 2003. Bush's reply:
Actually, prior to September 11, we were discussing smart sanctions. We were trying to fashion a sanctions regime that would make it more likely to be able to contain somebody like Saddam Hussein. After September 11, the doctrine of containment just doesn't hold any water. The strategic vision of our country shifted dramatically because we now recognize that oceans no longer protect us, that we're vulnerable to attack. And the worst form of attack could come from somebody acquiring weapons of mass destruction and using them on the American people. I now realize the stakes. I realize the world has changed. My most important obligation is to protect the American people from further harm, and I will do that.
In his cabinet meetings before 9/11 Bush may, in O'Neill's words, have been like a blind man in a room full of deaf people. But, as O'Neill also says, in those early strategy meetings Bush did say the plan from the start was to attack Iraq, using any pretext. Bush's language about “smart sanctions” from the press conference at the start of last year was as brazen and far more momentous a lie as any of those that earned Bill Clinton the Republicans' impeachment charges.
THE EDITORS' GLOSS: The idea that people are innocent until proven guilty, entitled to equitable treatment at the hands of others or the government, entitled to a reasonably free exercise of rights to expression, religious worship, and the like – these are all elements of whatever is left of the positive image of Britain and the United States in the world today.
Yet history shows that these nations frequently departed from the noblest aspects of their legal and political traditions to pursue what they hypocritically maintained was “a higher good,” if not mere “national interest.” Robert Fisk's historical sketch of Iraq, published in The Independent, June 17, 2004, is one choice example of this attempt to “civilize” at gunpoint, and is chillingly similar to the experiment America is conducting there today. As Maurizio Blondet illustrates in the chapter that follows – and as sketched philosophically by Prof. Claes Ryn later – the willingness of the U.S. to follow, some 80 years later, in Britain's footsteps stems from a tragic commitment to an amorphous and ideological “democracy,” at the expense of the principles – such as self-determination and political integrity – that such a democracy is supposed to support and defend. It is a commitment whose insincerity is to be found not in the fine print of much-publicized declarations, but in its brutal application to nations and peoples who would prefer not to embrace such a kind of “democracy.”
CHAPTER
2
Iraq, 1917
………
Robert Fisk
ON THE EVE of our “handover” of “full sovereignty” to Iraq, this is a story of tragedy and folly and of dark foreboding. It is about the past-made-present, and our ability to copy blindly and to the very letter the lies and follies of our ancestors. It is about that admonition of antiquity: that if we don't learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it. For Iraq 1917, read Iraq 2003. For Iraq 1920, read Iraq 2004 or 2005.
Yes, we have given “full sovereignty” to Iraq. That's also what the British falsely claimed more than 80 years ago. Come, then, and confront the looking glass of history, and see what America and Britain will do in the next 12 terrible months in Iraq.
Our story begins in March 1917 as 22-year-old Private 11072 Charles Dickens of the Cheshire Regiment peels a poster off a wall in the newly captured city of Baghdad. It is a turning point in his life. He has survived the hopeless Gallipoli campaign, attacking the Ottoman empire only 150 miles from its capital, Constantinople. He has then marched the length of Mesopotamia, fighting the Turks yet again for possession of the ancient caliphate, and enduring the grim battle for Baghdad. The British invasion army of 600,000 soldiers was led by Lieutenant-General Sir Stanley Maude, and the sheet of paper that caught Private Dickens's attention was Maude's official “Proclamation” to the people of Baghdad, printed in English and Arabic.
That same 11” by 18” poster, now framed in black and gold, hangs on the wall a few feet from my desk as I write this story of empire and dark prophecy. Long ago, the paper was stained with damp – “foxed,” as booksellers say – which may have been Private Dickens's perspiration in the long hot Iraqi summer of 1917. It has been folded many times; witness, as his daughter Hilda would recall 86 years later, to its presence in his army knapsack over many months.
In a letter to me, she called this “his precious document,” and I can see why. It is filled with noble aspirations and presentiments of future tragedy; with the false promises of the world's greatest empire, commitments and good intentions; and with words of honour that were to be repeated in the same city of Baghdad by the next great empire more than two decades after Dickens's death. It reads now like a funeral dirge:
Proclamation …. Our military operations have as their object, the defeat of the enemy and the driving of him from these territories. In order to complete this task I am charged with absolute and supreme control of all regions in which British troops operate; but our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators …. Your citizens have been subject to the tyranny of strangers … and your fathers and yourselves have groaned in bondage. Your s
ons have been carried off to wars not of your seeking, your wealth has been stripped from you by unjust men and squandered in different places. It is the wish not only of my King and his peoples, but it is also the wish of the great Nations with whom he is in alliance, that you should prosper even as in the past when your lands were fertile …. But you, people of Baghdad … are not to understand that it is the wish of the British Government to impose upon you alien institutions. It is the hope of the British Government that the aspirations of your philosophers and writers shall be realised once again, that the people of Baghdad shall flourish, and shall enjoy their wealth and substance under institutions which are in consonance with their sacred laws and with their racial ideals …. It is the hope and desire of the British people … that the Arab race may rise once more to greatness and renown amongst the peoples of the Earth …. Therefore I am commanded to invite you, through your Nobles and Elders and Representatives, to participate in the management of your civil affairs in collaboration with the Political Representative of Great Britain … so that you may unite with your kinsmen in the North, East, South and West, in realising the aspirations of your Race.
(signed) F.S. Maude, Lieutenant-General,
Commanding the British Forces in Iraq.
Private Dickens spent the First World War fighting Muslims, first the Turks at Suvla Bay at Gallipoli and then the Turkish army – which included Iraqi soldiers – in Mesopotamia. He spoke “often and admirably,” his daughter would recall, of one of his commanders, General Sir Charles Munro, who at 55 had fought in the last months of the Gallipoli campaign and then landed at Basra in southern Iraq at the start of the British invasion.
But Munro's leadership did not save Dickens's sister's nephew, Samuel Martin, who was killed by the Turks at Basra. Hilda remembers: “My father told of how, killing a Turk, he thought it was in revenge for the death of his 'nephew.' I don't know if they were in the same battalion, but they were a similar age, 22 years.”
Neo-Conned! Again Page 6