Bush Nominee as U.N. Ambassador Doesn’t Do Carrots—But Does Do Israel

By Ian Williams


	Activists gather outside the Capitol Building June 7 to protest the nomination of John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (AFP Photo/Brendan Smialowski).

THE CONFUSION in Washington about both the United Nations and the Middle East continues.

As of this writing, the president is still trying to get Senate confirmation of John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations—an organization Bolton has fairly consistently said the U.S. should pull out of.

As the nomination languished in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the five-year review conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty states was taking place throughout May at U.N. headquarters. It made no progress whatsoever, largely because the U.S. refused to allow even a mention of Israeli nuclear weapons on the official agenda, and because Washington had declared that all its previous declarations—about, for example, moving toward nuclear disarmament—did not apply.

Other states were interested to know how the U.S. could reconcile its commitments under the Treaty with its moves toward weaponization of space, not to mention John Bolton’s successful sabotage of U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. It did not help that allocations keep popping up in the U.S. budget for the development of new bunker-buster nukes and maintaining weapons-testing capabilities.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)—as demonstrated at its recent annual conference in Washington—continues to pressure the Bush administration to take action against what it calls the Iranian nuclear threat. Bolton, of course, needs no pressure. He has often been to Israel to discuss the dangers of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East—without mentioning his host’s 200 or so radioactive skeletons in the closet. And, of course, he is a leading proponent of robust action against Iran.

While he has not yet arrived at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, Bolton has departed the State Department, where he headed the disarmament desk, and the Department already has shown some signs of improvement. For example, Bolton, who had had the CIA check out chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix for usable dirt because of the latter’s reality-based approach to Iraqi weapons, was running the U.S. campaign to unseat Mohamed ElBaradei as head of the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA). The Egyptian’s sin, apart from being Egyptian and being called Mohamed, was his refusal to report an Iranian nuclear program that did not exist.

With Bolton gone, the U.S., which was alone in this campaign—without even British support!—has given up, and ElBaradei now is headed for a third term. Bolton has not given up on Iran, however. He is clearly aiming for the Nobel Prize for contortionism. He wants the IAEA, whose director he has tried to sack, to report Iran to the Security Council of the United Nations, in which he does not believe, for breaches of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, large sections of which the U.S. has unilaterally implied do not apply to itself.

Bolton in fact has codified his views on international law: It does not apply to the U.S. “Do as we say, not do as we do,” is his message. But to make it even more strained, had Washington cooperated at the NPT review, the members could have addressed the fatal flaws in the Convention: that there was nothing in the treaty to stop countries acquiring “peaceful” nuclear technology and then “unsigning” it, the way North Korea has, and as Iran now threatens to do.

In fact, of course, one major precedent for “unsigning” treaties was established by none other than John Bolton himself, whose career’s self-proclaimed highlight was the unsigning of the Rome Convention on the International Criminal Court.

Taken together, it is easy to see why so many oppose his nomination. What is really mysterious is what, apart from hairy-chested (or mustachioed) machismo, motivates the Bush administration to persevere in the face of such opposition. One clue, perhaps, is an item in Bolton’s résumé which only recently has really surfaced to prominence: his now-magnified role in rescinding the U.N. resolution declaring Zionism to be a form of racism.

To remind readers, after the first Gulf war, George Bush senior and James Baker tried to fulfill the pledges they had made to all the Middle Eastern states which had joined the Coalition against Iraq, about securing equitable peace between Israel and the Palestinians. They came hard up against the Likud refusal to budge, and, not unreasonably, saw no reason why the American taxpayer should pony up for huge loan guarantees to Israel for building settlements. Bush senior faced down the Israel lobby, and won—in the short run, at least.

As the election loomed, the victor of Desert Storm found his popularity plummeting, and it is clear that at least some of his entourage decided that this was the Israel lobby’s revenge. In a vain attempt to turn it around, the administration made it a major priority to secure the overturning of the “Zionism is Racism” resolution at the United Nations.

At the time, the credit was given to James Baker’s robust carrot-and-stick style of diplomacy for getting indifferent and agnostic delegations to vote the resolution through. Meanwhile, the Israelis were so unimpressed that the Israeli ambassador to the U.N. did not even attend the session. They knew that Bush/Baker had been the first U.S. administration to stand up to them since Dwight Eisenhower’s and were in no mood to help.

But now Bolton is taking credit for the resolution, which really is over-larding the cake. The Likud supporters already love him beyond all measure—and Bolton does not do carrots.

No Reason to Feel Lonely

There is no reason whatsoever for Bolton to feel lonely, however. Away from the more cerebral chamber of the Senate, the House of Representatives, with the support of almost every Republican member, passed Henry Hyde’s U.N. Reform Act. Just like in the good old days of Jesse Helms, the law again would put the U.S. in open diplomatic warfare with the U.N. (i.e., the rest of the world). The first successful proposals to unilaterally reduce American dues to the U.N. came from legislators opposed to the organization’s spending on the Palestinian question, and it may be significant that any such programs are an explicit target of this law as well.

To be truthful, however, many of them support it for more old-fashioned reasons of xenophobia and isolationism—even if, in their modern form, these philosophies do not inhibit military action in other countries, but simply seem to preclude listening to what other countries may have to say.

Hyde, who has always wanted the U.S. to leave the United Nations, like Bolton, pretends to want to reform it, but both clearly hold the philosophy that the only good U.N. is a dead one. The congressman’s main achievement is to make this administration look moderate, since the White House is opposing the House bill, and the Senate is unlikely to buy into the backwoods loony tunes concert either.

One reason why the White House is not prepared to throw the U.N. overboard is that—with the occasional aberration of the strong stand against the Iraq invasion—the organization usually is very compliant with Washington’s whims.

Syrian Withdrawal Confirmed

At the end of May came the report from Lebanon, which to the mild surprise of many people, and doubtless to the chagrin of whomever in Washington was looking for this excuse to attack Syria, told the Security Council that Damascus had withdrawn.

However, troublemakers will doubtless be reassured that the verification team discovered a potential Shabaa Farms situation. In the Deir Al Ashayr area on the border with Syria they saw a Syrian battalion, “apparently in Lebanese territory, according to the maps provided by both the Syrian and Lebanese military authorities.”

The Syrian brigadier general told the U.N. team that the position was inside Syria, “pointing out a line of stone mounds in front of the location that allegedly marked the border.” However, the border is not clearly defined—not least, of course, since Syria has never entirely and unequivocally accepted that there is a border at all.

The inspectors “noted the long-standing military cooperation between the Syrian and Lebanese armies, which continues today even after the withdrawal,” and anticipated mutual exchange visits between Lebanese and Syrian officers.

“The withdrawal of the Syrian intelligence apparatus has been harder to verify because intelligence activities are by nature often clandestine,” the monitors pointed out, and so while all uniformed agents are out, undercover activities, by definition, are unverifiable. This has the U.S. hard-liners pushing, since as we know from weapons of mass destruction, one does not need hard evidence, merely hard suspicions repeated over and over, to provide a cause for war. Syria or Iran, who cares?

Target Practice Continues

And then there is a follow up to the departure of Peter Hansen for the as-yet-unfilled directorship of UNRWA, showing once again that the U.S. actually has far more control of the U.N. than is good for the world. Professor Cherif Bassiouni, the Egyptian-American human rights lawyer who was one of the movers behind the Hague Tribunals on crimes in the Balkans and Rwanda, has been removed from his position as special representative for human rights in Afghanistan.

A year ago, Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed Bassiouni, a professor at De Paul University in Chicago, to fill a vacancy mandated by the U.N. Human Rights Commission, of which the U.S. is a member. His job was to monitor human rights violations in Afghanistan and make recommendations on how the government could improve them.

It would be no surprise to anyone who knew Bassiouni, or events in Afghanistan, that his two reports did not whitewash the dire position of human rights in the country, nor that they also detailed the U.S. forces’ violations of them, which include unlawful detentions, and consequent murder and torture.

When the commission met this past April, the statement on Afghanistan somehow erased all mention of the American contributions to the country’s gloomy human rights picture. The U.S. and other Western countries often have derided the commission for its willingness to whitewash the human rights record of the violators who frequently seem to make their way onto it. Cleverly, the U.S. seems to have proven its own accusations.

According to most reports, Bassiouni’s job disappeared in the course of deliberations because of strong pressure from United States officials, who began a whispering campaign against him. While he is an American passport holder, he is also an Egyptian, which in the post-PATRIOT Act world somewhat devalues whatever dubious protections his American citizenship may once have offered.

The EU ambassadors in Kabul wanted Bassiouni’s mandate to continue, and for him to remain. Afghan President Hamid Karzai asked for him to be retained, Bassiouni chuckles, “not because he liked the bad news I was bringing about human rights violations, but because his own ministers and officials weren’t telling him what was going on.”

Bassiouni noted that Washington had not objected to his first report a year ago, which was equally damning, so what changed? He maintains it was the U.S. Supreme Court decision which brought Guantanamo out of legal limbo.

“They are trying to clean it up for when the Court looks more closely at what is going on. Their decision last year gave the administration a year to clean the place up, and that was running out. Between February and April, they transferred 200 people from Guantanamo to Afghanistan,” he explained. They did not want a human rights lawyer poking into the cells and cages.

Bassiouni was also a collateral casualty of the German attempt to fawn its way up to a permanent seat on the Security Council. The Germans lobbied hard in the European delegation to let the Americans have their way, he says, because they maintained that, despite the wishes of the government and diplomatic corps in Kabul, the issue of human rights in Afghanistan was not the “right one” on which to confront the Americans.

However, Berlin’s groveling was not enough to spare them the Wrath of W. This administration is of a thoroughly unforgiving cast. As soon as Bassiouni was out, Washington announced its guidelines for future permanent members: only permanent puppets need apply, and Germany and Brazil were both fairly explicitly precluded. Since China has similar reservations against Japan, it would appear that this particular U.N. Reform has all the prospects of a genuine Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank.

Ian Williams is a free-lance journalist based at the United Nations.