[Peace-discuss] Bush's war on the UN

[Paul Patton]

 *A Declaration Of War *
 *by Phyllis Bennis*
  
The Bush administration has declared war on the world.
The 450 changes that Washington is demanding to the action agenda that will 
culminate at the September 2005 United Nations summit don't represent U.N. 
reform. They are a clear onslaught against any move that could strengthen 
the United Nations or international law.

The upcoming summit was supposed to focus on strengthening and reforming the 
U.N. and address issues of aid and development, with a particular emphasis 
on implementing the U.N.'s five-year-old Millennium Development Goals 
(MDGs). Most assumed this would be a forum for dialogue and debate, 
involving civil society activists from around the world challenging 
governments from the impoverished South and the wealthy North and the United 
Nations to create a viable global campaign against poverty and for 
internationalism.

But now, there's a different and even greater challenge. This is a 
declaration of U.S. unilateralism, uncompromising and ascendant. The United 
States has issued an open threat to the 190 other U.N. member states, the 
social movements and peoples of the entire world, and the United Nations 
itself. And it will take a quick and unofficially collaborative effort 
between all three of those elements to challenge the Bush administration 
juggernaut.

The General Assembly's package of proposed reforms, emerging after nine 
months of negotiations ahead of the summit, begins with new commitments to 
implement the Millennium Development Goals—established in 2000 as a set of 
international commitments aimed at reducing poverty by 2015. They were 
always insufficient, yet as weak as they are, they have yet to be 
implemented. The 2005 Millennium Plus Five summit intended to shore up the 
unmet commitments to those goals. In his reform proposals of March 2005, U.N. 
Secretary General Kofi Annan called on governments north and south to see 
the implementation of the MDGs as a minimum requirement. Without at least 
that minimal level of poverty alleviation, he said, conflicts within and 
between states could spiral so far out of control that even a strengthened 
and reformed United Nations of the future would not be able to control the 
threats to international peace and security.

When John Bolton, Bush's hotly contested but newly appointed ambassador to 
the United Nations announced the U.S. proposed response, it was easy to 
assume this was just John Bolton running amok. After all, Bolton, a longtime 
U.N.-basher, has said: "There is no United Nations." He has written in *The 
Wall Street Journal* that the United States has no legal obligation to abide 
by international treaties, even when they are signed and ratified. So it was 
no surprise when Bolton showed up three weeks before the summit, demanding a 
package of 450 changes in the document that had been painstakingly 
negotiated for almost a year.

But, in fact, this isn't about Bolton. This Bush administration's position 
was vetted and approved in what the U.S. Mission to the U.N. bragged was a 
"thorough interagency process"—meaning the White House, the State 
Department, the Pentagon and many more agencies all signed off. This is a 
clear statement of official U.S. policy—not the wish- ist of some 
marginalized extremist faction of neocon ideologues who will soon be reined 
in by the realists in charge. This time the extremist faction is in charge.

The U.S. proposal package is designed to force the world to accept as its 
own the U.S. strategy of abandoning impoverished nations and peoples, 
rejecting international law, privileging ruthless market forces over any 
attempted regulation, sidelining the role of international institutions 
except for the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO, and weakening, perhaps 
fatally, the United Nations itself.

It begins by systematically deleting every one of the 35 specific references 
to the Millennium Development Goals. Every reference to concrete obligations 
for implementation of commitments is deleted. Setting a target figure of 
just 0.7 percent of GNP for wealthy countries to spend on aid? Deleted. 
Increasing aid for agriculture and trade opportunities in poor countries? 
Deleted. Helping the poorest countries, especially those in Africa, to deal 
with the impact of climate change? Deleted.

The proposal puts at great risk treaties to which the United States is 
already a party, including the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The U.N. 
Summit draft referred to the NPT's "three pillars: disarmament, 
non-proliferation and the peaceful use of nuclear energy." That means that 
states without nukes would agree never to build or obtain them, but in 
return they would be guaranteed the right to produce nuclear energy for 
peaceful use. In return recognized nuclear weapons states—the United States, 
Britain, France, China and Russia—would commit, in Article VI of the NPT, to 
move toward "nuclear disarmament with the objective of eliminating all such 
weapons." The proposed U.S. changes deleted all references to the three 
pillars and to Article VI.

The U.S. deleted the statement that: "The use of force should be considered 
as an instrument of last resort." That's also not surprising given the Bush 
administration's "invade first, choose your justifications later" mode of 
crisis resolution.

Throughout the document, the United States demands changes that redefine and 
narrow what should be universal and binding rights and obligations. In the 
clearest reference to Iraq and Palestine, Washington narrowed the definition 
of the "right of self-determination of peoples" to eliminate those who 
"remain under colonial domination and foreign occupation."

Much of the U.S. effort aims to undermine the power of the U.N. in favor of 
absolute national sovereignty. On migration, for instance, the original 
language focused on enhancing international cooperation, linking migrant 
worker issues and development, and the human rights of migrants. The U.S. 
wants to scrap it all, replacing it with "the sovereign right of states to 
formulate and enforce national migration policies," with international 
cooperation only to facilitate national laws. Human rights were deleted 
altogether.

In the document's section on strengthening the United Nations, the U.S. 
deleted all mention of enhancing the U.N.'s authority, focusing instead only 
on U.N. efficiency. Regarding the General Assembly the most democratic organ 
of the U.N. system—the United States deleted references to the Assembly's 
centrality, its role in codifying international law, and, ultimately its 
authority, relegating it to a toothless talking shop. It even deleted 
reference to the Assembly's role in Washington's own pet project—management 
oversight of the U.N. secretariat—leaving the U.S.-dominated and 
undemocratic Security Council, along with the U.S. itself (in the person of 
a State Department official recently appointed head of management in Kofi 
Annan's office) to play watchdog.

The Bush administration has given the United Nations what it believes to be 
a stark choice: adopt the U.S. changes and acquiesce to becoming an adjunct 
of Washington and a tool of empire, or reject the changes and be consigned 
to insignificance.

But the United Nations could choose a third option. It should not be 
forgotten that the U.N. itself has some practice in dealing with U.S. 
threats. President George W. Bush gave the U.N. these same two choices once 
before—in September 2002, when he threatened the global body with 
"irrelevance" if the U.N. did not embrace his call for war in Iraq. On that 
occasion, the United Nations made the third choice—the choice to grow a 
backbone, to reclaim its charter, and to join with people and governments 
around the world who were mobilized to say no to war. It was the beginning 
of eight months of triumph, in which governments and peoples and the U.N. 
stood together to defy the U.S. drive toward war and empire, and in doing so 
created what *The New York Times* called "the second super-power."

This time, as before, the United States has threatened and declared war on 
the United Nations and the world. As before, it's time for that three-part 
superpower to rise again, to defend the U.N., and to say no to empire.

*Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the Institute for Policy
Studies<http://www.ips-dc.org/>, is the author of the forthcoming
* *Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the U.N. Defy U.S.
Power<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/156656607X/commondreams-20/ref=nosim>
(Interlink
Publishing, Northampton MA, October 2005*

(c) 2005 TomPaine.com
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