Guardian/UK 17 October 2013
In February 1972, US president
Richard Nixon made a "surprise" visit to China, recognising Mao
Zedong's communist regime and opening the door to the more or less peaceful
relations that have prevailed ever since between the two countries. Although
Nixon had built his political career on the anticommunist campaigns that were
in part a reaction to the "loss of China" in 1949, he was then
following in the footsteps of General Charles de Gaulle, who had established
diplomatic relations with China eight years earlier, in 1964..
In 1973 Nixon and Henry Kissinger
signed the Paris
accords that put an official end to the US war in Vietnam. A decade
before that, John F Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev resolved the Cuban missile
crisis by, on the Soviet side, withdrawing missiles from Cuba, and, on the US side, by promising
not to attack Cuba and withdrawing missiles from Turkey.
These events changed the course
of history away from endless confrontation and the risk of global war. It must
be remembered that neither China nor the Soviet Union nor North Vietnam met
western standards of democracy, less so in fact than present-day Iran. De
Gaulle, Kennedy, Nixon and Kissinger were no friends of communism and, on the
other side, neither Khrushchev, Mao nor the Vietnamese had any use for
capitalism and western imperialism.
Peace is not something to be made
between friends but between adversaries. It is based on a recognition of
reality. When countries or ideologies are in conflict, there are only two
issues: total destruction of one side, as with Rome and Carthage, or peace and
negotiations. As history shows, in the case of the Soviet Union, China and
Vietnam, peace was a precondition that made the internal evolution of those
countries possible.
During recent decades, when it
comes to the Middle East, the west has forgotten the very notion of diplomacy.
Instead, it has followed the line of "total destruction of the
enemy", whether Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, the
Assad regime in Syria or the Islamic Republic of Iran. That line has been based
on ideology: a mixture of human rights fundamentalism and blind support for the
"only democracy in the region", Israel. However, it has led to a
total failure: this policy has brought no benefit whatsoever to the west and
has only caused immense suffering to the populations that it claimed to be
helping.
There are signs that the
situation is changing. The British and then the American people and their
representatives rejected a new war in Syria. Russia, the US and Syria reached
an agreement over Syria's chemical weapons. US president Barack Obama is making
moves towards honest negotiations with Iran, and the EU's foreign policy chief
and Iran's foreign minister judged talks just concluded in Geneva as
"substantive and forward-looking".
All these developments should be
pursued with the utmost energy. The planned second Geneva conference on Syria
must include all internal and external parties to the conflict if it is to
constitute an important step towards finding a solution to the tragedy of that
war-torn country. The unjust sanctions against Iran, as in the earlier case of
Iraq, are severely punishing the population and must be lifted as soon as possible.
Israeli prime minister Binyamin
Netanyahu and his supporters are staunchly opposed to these moves towards
peace. But they must realise that we might start asking questions about the
biggest elephant in the room: Israel's weapons of mass destruction. Why should
that country, alone in the region, possess such weapons? If its security is
sacrosanct, what about the security of the Palestinians, or of the Lebanese?
And why should the US continue to bankroll a country that superbly ignores all
its requests, such as stopping settlements in the Occupied Territories?
Countries are inhabited by people
possessing common humanity, with the right to live, regardless of ideology. Ideology
divides. Our real interests presuppose peaceful relations between different
social systems and mutual respect of national sovereignty. Our interests, well
understood, coincide with those of the rest of mankind. [Abbrev.]
Hans Christof von Sponeck
was UN assistant secretary general and United Nations humanitarian co-ordinator
for Iraq from 1998-2000. Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann was president
of the UN general assembly between 2008 and 2009 and foreign minister of
Nicaragua from 1979 to 1990. Denis J Halliday was UN assistant
secretary general from 1994-98 http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/17/middle-east-prize-peace
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