You
could almost pity these people. For 67 years successive US governments have
resisted calls to reform the UN security
council. They've defended a system which grants five nations a veto
over world affairs, reducing all others to impotent spectators. They have
collaborated with the other four permanent members (the UK, Russia, China and
France) in a colonial carve-up, at the expense of peace and global justice. Never
have Obama or his predecessors attempted a serious reform of this system.
In 1997 the US agreed to decommission the
31,000 tonnes of sarin, VX, mustard gas and
other agents it possessed within 10 years. In 2007 it requested the
maximum extension permitted– five years. Again it failed to keep its promise,
and in 2012 it claimed they would be gone by 2021. Russia yesterday urged Syria to place its chemical weapons under
international control. Perhaps it should press the US to do the
same.
The
US used millions of gallons of chemical weapons in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
It also used them during its destruction
of Falluja in 2004, then
lied about it. The Reagan government helped Saddam Hussein to wage
war with Iran in the 1980s while aware that he was using nerve and mustard gas.
(The Bush administration then cited this deployment as an excuse to attack
Iraq, 15 years later).
Smallpox
has been eliminated from the human population, but two nations – the US and
Russia – insist on keeping the pathogen in cold storage. They claim their
purpose is to develop defences against possible biological weapons attack, but
most experts in the field consider this to be nonsense. While raising concerns
about each other's possession of the disease, they have worked together to
bludgeon the other members of the World Health Organisation, which have pressed
them to destroy their stocks.
In
2001 the New York Times reported that "the Pentagon has built a germ factory that could make enough lethal microbes
to wipe out entire cities". The Pentagon claimed the purpose
was defensive. Looming over all this is
the cover the US provides for Israel's weapons of mass destruction. It's also that, as the Washington Post points
out: "Syria's chemical weapons stockpile results from a never-acknowledged
gentleman's agreement in the Middle East that as long as Israel had nuclear
weapons, Syria's pursuit of chemical weapons would not attract much public
acknowledgement or criticism." Israel has developed its nuclear arsenal in
defiance of the non-proliferation treaty, and the US supports it in defiance of
its own law, which forbids the disbursement of aid to a country with
unauthorised weapons of mass destruction.
Looming over all this is the cover the US
provides for Israel's weapons of mass destruction. Israel has developed its nuclear arsenal in
defiance of the non-proliferation treaty, and the US supports it in defiance of
its own law, which forbids the disbursement of aid to a country with
unauthorised weapons of mass destruction.
As
for the norms of international law, let's remind ourselves where the US stands.
It remains outside the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, after
declaring its citizens immune from prosecution. The crime of aggression it
committed in Iraq – defined by the Nuremberg tribunal as "the supreme
international crime" – goes not just unpunished but also unmentioned by
anyone in government.
Obama's
failure to be honest about his nation's record of destroying international norms
and undermining international law, his myth-making about the role of the US in
world affairs, and his one-sided interventions in the Middle East, all render
the crisis in Syria even harder to resolve. Until there is some candour about
past crimes and current injustices, until there is an effort to address the
inequalities over which the US presides, everything it attempts will stoke the
cynicism and anger the president says he wants to quench.
Copyright
2013 The Guardian
[Abridged]
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