Restraining the behemoth? The US, the UN and Iraq

Will the United Nations (UN) Security Council Resolution 1441, which imposes a new weapons inspection process on Iraq, circumvent the US drive to war on Saddam Hussein’s regime? Despite the belligerent noises in the Iraqi ‘parliament’ this week, the indications of Saddam Hussein’s previous behaviour are that the resolution will prove more of a contrasting, ‘legal’ road to war than an alternative to war itself. The Iraqi ruler will need an unprecedented political and psychological makeover to accede to all the stringent conditions of compliance that the resolution prescribes for him.

Moreover, even if he were to cooperate in the total way demanded by the resolution, he could be fatally weakened internally by the visible humiliation. Already the near riots outside the prisons after Saddam Hussein’s amnesty have a whiff of a ‘Ceauşescu moment’: that critical time when a deeply degraded people senses that its tyrant has lost his clothes.

In any case, after its administration’s period of unilateral belligerence up to August, the US has certainly won its major point at the Security Council. Regardless of the opinions of the rest of the world, Iraq is the first item on the global security agenda, even if no other Security Council member would rank it so importantly. Even Tony Blair, the US’s closest ally over Iraq, has been vainly trying to point out the equal importance of the Israel/Palestine issue, both in its own right and in terms of coalition-building. Even in terms of defiance of UN resolutions, Iraq is far from the worst offender. The Cyprus issue or the Pakistan–India nuclear stand-off each pose a more potent threat to international peace and security.

However, the final draft of 1441 still echoes the sigh of relief that greeted George W. Bush’s speech on 12 September announcing his newly found devotion to the UN. The alternative was the world’s most important nation flouting the UN Charter and the major principles of international law on which the post Second World War settlement depends. It is then hardly surprising that so many were prepared to accommodate US whims – even fairly lethal ones – to preserve the appearance of legality. Those reluctant to do so were motivated less by concern for the fate of Saddam than for their own future, were the trends exhibited here to become standard.

The diplomacy of multilateral lawlessness?

This is not to minimise the achievements of the negotiators who ground down some of the most unacceptably spiky portions of the original draft. As well as the much more visible French role, even the British quietly exhorted a multilateral approach beside their publicly uncritical support. However, the fulcrum for the negotiations was not between the permanent five in the Council, but inside what one Irish diplomat engagingly referred to as the ‘P-1’. The real battle, in other words, was fought between Secretary of State Colin Powell on one side, and the Cheney, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld axis on the other.

One factor that probably helped Powell’s brief with President Bush was public opinion. Bush has shown pragmatic attention to polls on other issues, despite the hard-right’s pressure (for example, his silence over social security privatisation during the mid-term elections). A Pew research poll has shown that 66% of Americans, a frighteningly high proportion, think that Saddam was involved in 9/11; but it has also revealed a very limited enthusiasm for American unilateral action against Saddam Hussein without allies. This reluctance was almost certainly strengthened by the French-led resistance in the Security Council to the original draft.

In the end, Powell, using this resistance and indeed invoking the support of the British, was able to win in two senses. Apart from respecting international legality, the final draft has come a long way from its ‘take it or leave it’ origins. When Iraq originally accepted inspections, it visibly annoyed the President, who behaved almost like a child whose toy had been confiscated. But he soon recovered, and the final resolution, although strict, genuinely gives Iraq a chance to avoid war by cooperation with UNMOVIC (UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission) and the IAEA. It also avoids giving the US the automatic right to attack, which the hawks had originally insisted on.

Powell’s internal victory allowed him to deploy diplomatic skills that achieved a result unmatchable by the bluster of the hawks – typified in their most hard-line exponent, Under Secretary of State John Bolton, whose positions could scarcely muster a bare majority in the Council previously. It is a lesson in effective diplomacy for Bush, and a big boost to Colin Powell’s position.

On the other hand, despite Powell’s pragmatic and principled commitment to multilateralism, this ‘good cop/bad cop’ routine on the part of the administration is far from an unalloyed blessing for the world. In effect, the other members of the Security Council have given deputies’ stars, search warrants and a near-enough definitive promise of arrest and execution if anything is found, to an American lynch mob. In return, the US has not even renounced its claimed right of unilateral attack.

More positively, it has in effect pledged not to exercise its claims – as long as the UN does the ‘right thing’ and provides multilateral sanction for what the US wants. Similarly, the original US position was that it did not want a second resolution but, by the end, its stand was more that it did not need one. Once it agreed to a recalled meeting of the Council to consider any Iraqi breaches, it had in fact paved the way for the French hastily to table a new resolution authorising the action that the US was certain to take anyway. It is inconceivable that the US would oppose, let alone veto, such a resolution; taken together, the two resolutions make the military task of attacking Iraq so much easier when the time comes. After all, as Colin Powell himself knows from the 1991 Gulf War, even a superpower needs allies to conduct operations far from home.

The 19th century German chancellor, Bismarck, once commented that people who want to appreciate treaties or sausages should not watch them being made. This also applies to Security Council decisions. The high probability of war resulting from Resolution 1441 is disturbing, especially to purists. But those who denounced the US for not getting a UN mandate against Iraq now have to eat their words while holding their nose.

At the moment, the unanimous decision of the world’s only body with the power to initiate a legal military attack against Iraq has served notice on its ruler that he must cooperate. If, as seems likely, Powell maintains his position within the administration in relation to the hawks, and the US waits for a genuine and visible serious further ‘material breach’, then Saddam Hussein will be more than half responsible for his failure to abide by the ceasefire resolution he agreed to in order to ensure his survival back in 1991.

Taken as a whole, the long resistance and diplomatic campaign of attrition in the Security Council should send a warning to Washington, and a rallying cry to the rest of the world, that the US has to engage with other countries, and cannot always have everything its own way. This will be small comfort for Saddam Hussein in his own time of decision; far more significantly, it offers some hope for a more multilateral future.

Put it this way, the resolution may prove to be just a fig leaf for US policy against Iraq. But if it acts to reinforce the American public’s view that UN support is necessary for the legitimate deployment of US force, its existence could act as a restraint if and when the time comes to an escalation against Iran.