Making War to Keep Peace (42 page)

Perhaps most ironic of all, for a decade the nation of Iraq repeatedly violated the series of Security Council resolutions that followed the 1991 cease-fire—yet Annan did not rebuke Iraq for illegal behavior. And yet, by condemning the U.S. action in Iraq in 2003 as “illegal,” he provided an excuse for many member nations to refuse to back any effort to force Iraq to abide by the terms of the 1991 cease-fire and, in doing so, to absolve themselves of their crucial responsibility as member states to take action against true crimes against international law and to aid in the restoration of peace for the people of Iraq.

A secretary-general acts as the UN's chief diplomat. His comments and actions carry global impact, with potential long-term implications. So it is imperative for all secretary-generals to act responsibly, to speak honestly, and to work within the UN Charter—that is, to affirm the rule of law among nations as a first priority. The more a secretary-general can live up to the gravitas of his role, the more warranted will be efforts such as those by George H.W. Bush to demonstrate respect for the UN and its Charter, as he did with the first Iraq war. In the process, the UN culture itself may shift toward enforcing stability and prosperity based on the rule of law—not the whim or greed of individuals. Yet, always, the will to op
pose forces hostile to the rule of law must remain vigilant, as a review of even the few years between the two Iraq wars attests.

On the Road to War

By the time the United States was preparing for war in 2003, the UN oil-for-food program was in its sixth year of operation. It was established by the Security Council in December 1996 to provide temporarily for the humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people during economic sanctions, which had been imposed after Iraq's invasion into Kuwait. The oil-for-food program allowed Iraq to sell oil under UN auspices in order to use the proceeds to purchase food and medicine. Shortly after the 2003 invasion, the program was dismantled.

On February 3, 2003, U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell addressed the UN Security Council to review Iraq's disarmament obligations under Security Council Resolution 1441, which passed by unanimous vote in November 2002.

By then, Saddam had violated some seventeen previous resolutions demanding his verifiable disarmament. Resolution 1441 was passed after U.S. and European inspectors agreed that Iraq had not fully complied with its obligations under previous resolutions, and that it was in “material breach” of Resolution 687. Moreover, Resolution 1441 listed
nine binding steps
Iraq must take to give inspectors “unrestricted access” to sites where weapons might be hidden or face “serious consequences.” As of that February day when Secretary Powell addressed the Security Council, no steps had been taken to abide by that resolution.

Resolution 1441 was critical, as Secretary Powell commented:

Secretary Powell reminded the Security Council that Resolution 1441 had placed the burden on Iraq to comply and disarm—not on the inspectors to find weapons Iraq had worked to conceal. He reminded the council of the assessment made by Dr. Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, whose January 27 report stated that “Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament which was demanded of it.”
¹¹
Powell reinforced Blix's findings using the IAEA director's December report to the Council, in which Dr. Mohammad El Baradei demonstrated that Iraq's declaration “did not provide any new information relevant to questions that have been outstanding since 1998.”
¹²

Secretary Powell's case also reviewed the many conversations among Saddam and his closest collaborators about their efforts to hide weapons. Describing the Iraqi scientists' reports, he recapped three key points:

1. Saddam Hussein has used horrific weapons on another country (Iran) and on his own people…. No other country has had more battlefield experience with chemical weapons since World War I.
   
2. Saddam Hussein has never accounted for vast amounts of chemical weaponry now unaccounted for.
   
3. Iraq's record on chemical weapons is replete with lies.
   ¹³
   

For Saddam Hussein, the UN threats were not persuasive; their challenges were merely verbal, after all, not military. In the meantime, his noncompliance was advancing his own agenda and his own self-interest. Saddam himself could see that he had been involved in behavior counter to his own agreements with the world community for over a decade with no real consequence. What was permissible on the international stage was uncharted territory well beyond the rule of international law.

KOFI ANNAN EXPANDS HIS UN ROLE

Annan's charge that the U.S. invasion was “illegal” was only the latest in a series of similar remarks he had made from the beginning of the Iraq de
bate. Like his immediate predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, during the Bosnia crisis, Annan made unprecedented assertions of his authority and power to define the legitimacy and “legality” of a member state's decision to use force. Before the invasion began, for example, Annan told a press conference in The Hague: “Security Council members now face a momentous choice. If they fail to agree on a common position [concerning Iraq], and action is taken without the authority of the Security Council, the legitimacy and support for any such action will be seriously impaired. If the U.S. and others were to go outside the council and take military action it would not be in conformity with the Charter.”
¹⁴

Then, less than two weeks after the invasion, on April 2, Annan told the Arab network Al-Jazeera that he had “raised questions about the legitimacy” on the use of force by U.S. and coalition forces, “and whether it was in conformity with the Charter.”
¹⁵
Once again, Annan claimed a unique right to decide how the issue of Iraq should be dealt with, and by whom.

Some five months later, speaking to the General Assembly on September 23, 2003, Annan took another step, presuming to define the limits of member states' “inherent right of self-defense” as defined in Article 51 of the UN Charter. Article 51 states that “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.” Annan, in his September speech, unilaterally added to Article 51 an entirely new assertion. “Until now,” he said, “it has been understood that when states go beyond that and decide to use force to deal with broader threats to international peace and security, they need
the unique legitimacy provided by the United Nations
.”
¹⁶
This is a troubling formulation, one that raises more serious questions than it answers. By whom has Annan's claim been so understood or authorized? Certainly not by the Security Council. For that matter, who decided that the Security Council was the source of the “unique legitimacy” provided by the United Nations? Certainly not the sovereign member states who compose the United Nations. Annan's effort to expand the power of the UN itself, and with it his own role internationally, garnered little attention as international opposition to the Bush administration was gaining ground.

No answers were forthcoming when Annan informed the General Assembly that he intended to challenge the belief of some states that they have the right and obligation to use force preemptively without Security Council agreement. His remedy was to establish a high-level panel of eminent personalities (of his own choosing) to reflect on the problems of the United Nations and to alter its composition and procedures. That in itself was a shocking expansion attempt of the secretary-general's powers as defined in the UN Charter. Article 99 states that the secretary-general
may bring
to the attention of the Security Council any matter which
in his opinion
may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security.
¹⁷
The UN Charter, however, gives the secretary-general no authority to
act
unilaterally on his personal opinions. Secretary-generals are meant to play a constructive role, not a destructive one. They work at the service of the Security Council, not the other way around. Any attempt to usurp the authority of the Security Council is dangerous, jeopardizes the rule of law, and does not conform within the UN Charter. And yet Annan was using the circumstances created by Saddam's flagrant disregard for the 1991 cease-fire as a pretext to further his own expansionist goals—with the preservation of the rule of law a distant second priority.

As U.S. and coalition forces began to battle insurgents on the ground, and to rebuild the Iraqi nation torn apart by the rule of Saddam and the war that ousted him, Annan continued to advance his vocal march forward to discredit the invasion. In a meeting with Arab journalists on March 8, 2004, Annan claimed, “I myself indicated that a war would not be in conformity with the Charter and the credibility of any such action would be widely questioned and the legitimacy would be widely questioned. And that is what has happened.”
¹⁸
What the war was not in conformity with, of course, was Annan's own self-interested vision of the UN and its Secretariat, and his hopes to expand their international power.

No matter what any individual secretary-general may desire, however, the United Nations itself does not, and cannot, provide unique legitimacy to any action, whether peaceful or forceful. Only its member states may do so, because their decisions and actions derive presumably from the governed. Here the ideals of constitutional democracy and the rule of law are imbedded in the UN from the world leaders who created it. That is why the UN cannot presume a supranational role, but must in-
stead remain a collective of sovereign nations. That is why secretary-general Annan's opportunism in the wake of the Iraq war cannot, in the end, succeed. Even as the United States works to repair its international image, in some part due to Annan's expansionist behavior, the UN itself must also turn to a new secretary-general to help it survive the corruption and disarray in its own house, which are part of Annan's legacy. Until the UN reaffirms that its legitimacy is found in the sovereign rights of its member nations and in the rule of law, its effectiveness will be compromised.

This is borne out by many instances in recent history, in which, if a country had chosen not to exercise its sovereign rights until it had divulged a mission to protect or rescue its citizens, catastrophic consequences might have resulted. One such instance, which I recounted previously in this book and bears repeating, was Grenada, where more than six hundred American medical students were held at gunpoint by a group who held the island's entire population hostage with a shoot-on-sight curfew. This outlaw group had already killed five members of Grenada's cabinet in cold blood. The hostages in Grenada survived because U.S. troops, in a surprise landing, rescued them. Had the Reagan administration waited for the permission of the Security Council—or the “unique legitimacy” Secretary-General Annan claims can only be granted by the United Nations—before a rescue was attempted, many people, Grenadans and Americans alike, would have needlessly died.

The U.S. & Coalition Response

Along these lines, before President George W. Bush launched the invasion into Iraq, he did review Iraq's record. Like his father during the Gulf War, he explicitly argued that the United States has never taken the position that the use of force is legitimate only if it is specifically authorized by the Security Council. Nor could any serious nation have taken such a position in the decades since the UN was established. Nothing in the UN Charter can challenge sovereign rights. Even if an American were to disagree with the Bush Doctrine, as I did, no one can disagree with this fundamental analysis of the right of a nation to defend itself—or, under appropriate circumstances, to enforce a cease-fire by military means. The
U.S. action in Iraq had been authorized by the president and the U. S. Congress. As Vice President Cheney commented, the United States requires no “permission slip” from the UN to use its military.

Moreover, as in the first Gulf War, the United States did not fight this war alone. Thirty countries joined the effort, among them the United Kingdom, Spain, Australia, Bulgaria, and Poland—all of whom rejected Annan's charge that the action was illegal. Though he was facing a tight reelection race where his support for the Iraq war was a crucial issue, Australia's prime minister, John Howard, declared: “The legal advice that we had, and I tabled it at the time, was that the action was entirely valid in international law terms.” It was also valid in terms of U.S. law. The use of military force in Iraq in 2003 might have been ill-advised, in other words, but it was legitimate.

The U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations at the time, Ambassador John Danforth, took Annan to task for his statements and defended the sovereign rights of the United States and other member states: