|
|
|
|
Reforming the UN the
Bush way
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
TEHRAN - Whereas the first administration of US President George
W Bush grievously undermined the United
Nations organizationally, through its manipulation
of the Security Council in its anti-Iraq crusade,
the second administration is now gearing up to go
one step further and subvert the UN theoretically,
by infusing its unilateralist doctrine of
"preemptive" warfare as a legitimate principle of
the world's pre-eminent organization.
This
much is clear by the energy and zeal with which US
diplomats at the UN are nowadays pushing for the
adoption of proposals for UN reform by a select
"high-level panel", including the hawkish former
US national security adviser Brent Scowcroft; if
adopted, these proposals will seriously undermine
the spirit of multilateralism and collective
war-prohibition enshrined in the UN Charter.
A report by the panel, titled "The
High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and
Change", is comprehensive and introduces 110
recommendations that cover not only UN
institutions, but also other international
agencies affiliated with the UN. Focusing on the
spectrum of threats, old and new, confronting the
international community, the report identifies six
clusters of threats and makes specific
recommendations as to how to address each of these
threats considered highly "interrelated". These
are: economic and social threats, including
poverty, infectious diseases and environmental
degradation; inter-state conflict; internal
conflict, including civil war, genocide and other
large-scale atrocities; nuclear, radiological,
chemical and biological weapons; terrorism; and
transnational organized crime.
Unfortunately, despite its keen analysis
of the changing world milieu in the recent past,
and the need to make the UN a more effective
machine to fulfill its twin agenda of global peace
and prosperity, the panel's report points broadly
in the wrong direction in organizational and
functional terms.
Case in point, the
report seeks to revamp the notion of "collective
security" by adopting a broad notion of security
that covers poverty and development. Yet the
principle of collective security, enshrined in the
UN Charter as one of its prima facie roles
and responsibilities, can only be actualized if
there is a global consensus on the nature of
threats and the proper remedies to address those
threats.
The promotion of
collective security in a situation of diverse,
even polarized, threat perceptions cannot succeed
in practice, particularly if the concept of
security becomes vague and indeterminate, thus making
it even harder for a collective response by the UN
membership. The panel's securitization of health,
human rights, economic and environmental issues
and concerns, or its North-centric threat
perception overlooking superpower militarism, is
highly problematic, making collective security
overly broad and indeterminate, whereas it must be
capable of operationalization along a definite set
of dimensions.
The expressed or tacit
understanding of collective security in both the
UN Charter and throughout its history coalesce
around a diffuse but nevertheless clear
conceptualization as a multilateral action
stemming from the uncoerced and relatively
horizontal relations among the member states.
Contrary to the panel, there is no need for a new
lens or paradigm on collective security,
especially when what troubles the UN is more the
lack of collective will and less the absence of
consensus on what this will implies.
But by far the most troubling aspect of this report
is its endorsement of the notion of
"preemptive" warfare championed by the Bush administration.
The panel tackles the vexing problem of
"anticipatory" self-defense of states and argues that
"according to long-established international law, a
threatened state can take military action as long
as the threatened attack is imminent".
But
this
is a brazenly dubious assumption as international
law hardly confers an endorsement of this
dangerous idea that, in all likelihood, will lead
to greater resort to international violence by
lowering the threshold for unilaterally
determined contingencies that warrant
acts of self-defense.
The UN Charter,
Article 2.4, expressly prohibits member states
from using or threatening force against one
another, and Article 51 has clearly restricted the
right to self-defense to the cases when an armed
attack occurs, an interpretation upheld by the
Nuremberg International Military Tribunal (1947):
"Preventive action in foreign territory is
justified only in case of an instant and
overwhelming necessity for self-defense, leaving
no choice of means, and no moment for
deliberation."
Indeed, various
international law experts, such as Ian Brownlie
(International Law and the Use of Force by
States, 1963), have clearly maintained that
"an armed attack must occur across national
borders to trigger Article 51". As Abram Chayes
put it in the case of the Cuban missile crisis
(International Crisis and the Rule of Law, 1974), "It is a
very different matter to expand Article 51 to
include threatening developments or demonstrations
that do not have imminent attacks as their purpose
or probable outcome."
Yet US
leaders today boldly claim a new policy that
openly repudiates these crucial provisions of the
UN Charter. The 2002 US National Security Strategy
adopts the doctrine of preemption and states: "We
must adopt the concept of imminent threat to the
capabilities and objectives of today's
adversaries."
Repeatedly,
President Bush has stated that "the US will, if necessary,
act preemptively", that the US will resort to
"anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if
uncertainty remains as to the time and place of
the enemy's attack".
This approach
represents a significant departure from previous
conceptions of self-defense and gives a green
light to the US, or any other power, to commence
offensive military operations without first
exhausting other means, including diplomacy, and,
worse, without fulfilling the requirement that an
actual or an imminent armed attack has occurred.
The experience of the illegal invasion of
Iraq, under the false pretext of weapons of mass
destruction, presents a strong argument for
narrower, and more restrictive, acceptance of
anticipatory self-defense, notwithstanding
Pentagon deputy chief Paul Wolfowitz' admission
in Vanity Fair (May 2003) that "for bureaucratic
reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass
destruction, because it was the one reason
everyone could agree on".
Unfortunately,
neither Wolfowitz nor any other neo-conservative
of the Bush administration seems minutely
disturbed by the flagrant discrepancies between
international norms and their recipe for action,
decried by German philosopher Jurgen Habermas as
"the unilateral, world-ordering politics of a
self-appointed hegemon" reducing the UN Charter to
"a scrap of paper".
Of course, the
Bush administration has its own army of
international-law "experts", for example, those who claim that
the UN Charter "is long dead", as well as its
American detractors, such as Harvard's Kennedy
School dean, Joseph Nye, who has written that the
US is finding it beneficial to seek to legitimate
its preponderant power by building multilateral
support for its own unilateral policies
instrumentalizing the machinery of the Security
Council.
Thus the question: why should the
UN, currently debating the merits of the
"High-Level Panel Report", narrow the conceptual
gap between UN principles and the hegemonic
outlook of a lone superpower that is intent on
illegally meting out justice or democracy and
openly contemplating military attacks against
Iran, Syria and North Korea?
UN Secretary
General Kofi Annan has described the next stage in
UN history as a crucial "fork in the road", yet
few UN watchers doubt that a main challenge of the
UN today is how to save it from the scourge of
Washington warmongers.
Kaveh L
Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After
Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy
(Westview Press) and "Iran's Foreign Policy
Since 9/11", Brown's Journal of World Affairs,
co-authored with former deputy foreign minister
Abbas Maleki, No 2, 2003. He teaches political
science at Tehran University.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us for information
on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
All material on this
website is copyright and may not be republished in any form without written
permission.
© Copyright 1999 - 2005 Asia Times
Online Ltd.
|
|
Head
Office: Rm 202, Hau Fook Mansion, No. 8 Hau Fook St., Kowloon, Hong
Kong
Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
|
Asian Sex Gazette Asian Sex News
|
|
|
