BEIRUT — One of the dizzying dimensions of Middle East-related diplomacy in recent years has been the roller-coaster ride of the United Nations’ performance and perception in this region. The issue is important because the UN has recently become much more directly involved in several important conflicts in the Middle East.
Several immediate issues engage the UN Security Council in the Middle East these days, including Lebanese-Syrian and Lebanese-Israeli matters, the expanded UN troops presence in south Lebanon, Iran’s nuclear technology development plans, Darfur, and perhaps the Arab-Israeli conflict once again.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan recently toured the region, spoke to all parties and boycotted none, and coordinated and mediated closely among all key parties, especially the United States, Lebanon, Israel, Syria and Iran. By achieving the end of fighting in Lebanon and Israel, and the Israeli siege of Lebanon, the UN reaffirmed the value and efficacy of honest diplomacy as a method of conflict management and resolution.
This UN performance, however, is less impressive than its contentious involvement in Iraq since 1991. To delve deeper into this issue, I consulted with a respected Canadian diplomat who has just published a detailed, analytical book analyzing the UN Security Council’s performance in Iraq. David M. Malone, a Canadian scholar-diplomat and former ambassador to the UN, currently represents Canada in India. His book, The International Struggle Over Iraq: Politics in the UN Security Council, 1980-2005, was published this month by Oxford University Press.
Avoiding the politics- and media-driven ideological assaults that characterize much of the public discussion of the UN these days, this scholarly book analyzes the flow of events to build towards conclusions on how the Security Council can do better in the future, especially on the design and administration of large undertakings such as weapons inspections and the Oil-for-Food Program in Iraq.
When I contacted Malone in New Delhi, he suggested that the case of Iraq in the Security Council since 1980 “shows the council at its best — in response to Iraqi aggression against Kuwait in 1990-91 — and at its worst, subsequently often divided over Iraq strategy, culminating in its deadlock of March 2003. The UK and USA responded to the deadlock by overthrowing Saddam Hussein without an explicit council mandate to do so, in a move pregnant with consequence for Iraq and the region.”
He describes Security Council decision-making as tending to be reactive rather than preventative, as the Lebanon case revealed again, and as such it is often highly improvisational and “expedient,” in the words of former senior UN official Sir Kieran Prendergast. Often it is weak, Malone said, such as “the council’s pathetic response to Iraq’s unprovoked attack against Iran in 1980, when it failed to brand Iraq clearly as the aggressor.”
Tehran has never forgotten this betrayal, he suggests, and may be influenced by it still in its current demands for certain guarantees and clarifications from the international community related to its nuclear industry plans. Ultimately, though, the council in 1987 developed a strategy to end the Iraq-Iraq war.
A few chapters review in some depth the highly improvisational, often careless, way in which the Security Council established subsidiary machinery to administer weapons inspections, humanitarian relief to counterbalance economic sanctions (the ill-starred although largely effective Oil-for-Food program) and to compensate those who had suffered losses because of Iraq’s attack on Kuwait.” Malone feels that the UN Compensation Commission and initial weapons inspections programs worked well — until in some cases the permanent members divided over basic Iraq strategy. The subsequent weapons monitoring operation in Iraq, UNMOVIC, was more carefully designed to promote impartiality, but foundered on a lack of consensus among the five permanent members of the council.
The study says the Oil-for-Food program shows the council in several of its characteristic modes: well intentioned in humanitarian terms, but not necessarily hard-headed. The council winked at massive sanctions busting by several neighboring states with which the five permanent council members entertained good relations, while pretending to be serious about enforcement.
The Paul Volcker-led inquiry made clear that corporate corruption relating to the program and Saddam Hussein’s subversion of it were much more extensive than the limited bureaucratic graft and ineptness that inquiry documented.
What are the implications and lessons of his extensive analysis of the UN Security Council’s operations in Iraq?
“If the Council again establishes for the UN ambitious administrative goals involving large sums of money, it must do a much better, more professional job of design and oversight. The Secretariat will also need to improve its professionalism.
“Most importantly, unity among the five permanent members is critical for the attainment of ambitious objectives, and requires extensive compromise among the permanent powers,” he told me.
Once signs of serious division can be detected, as was the case with France’s defection as early as 1995 and 1996 from the strategy favored by London and Washington, the likelihood of a geo-strategic train-wreck increases greatly. That is why the five permanent members’ unity on Iran to date has been so important, he concluded.
Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, and editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star.
Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 12 September 2006
Word Count: 833
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