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The United Nations Security Council And International Conflict Resolution
[A CASE STUDY OF THE UN SECURITY COUNCIL WEAPON INSPECTION IN IRA]
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In
his State of the Union address, President Bush linked the case for war
against Iraq to the September 11 attacks, implying that Saddam Hussein
would replicate them once he got unclear weapons. In his words: “Saddam
is a threat and we are not going to wait until he does attack, he
declared, his weapons of mass destruction are a direct threat to this
country, if the world fails to confront the threat posed by the Iraqi
regime…., from nations would assume immense and unacceptable risks, the
attack of September 11, 2001, showed what the enemies of America did
with four airplanes. We will not wait to see what terrorist states could
do with weapons of mass destruction.
In the same speech, he stated emphatically that:
Saddam
Hussein is a threat to our nation, September, 11 changed the…
strategic thinking, at least as far as I was concerned, for how to
protect the country… used to be that we could think that you could
contain a person like Saddam Hussein, that oceans would protect us from
his type of terror. September 11 should say to the American people that
we’re now a battle field, that weapons of mass Destruction in the hands
of a terrorist organization could be deployed here at home (Bush, 2002:
18).
According to the Washington post (2002), when asked about the
possible human and financial costs of a war with Iraq, the President
answered, the price of doing nothing exceeds the price of taking
action…The price of the September 11 attack was enormous …And I’m not
willing to take chance again.
The failure to date of the Pentagon to
turn-up evidence that any weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq
poses obvious problems for the US. According to Patrick (2003) “ The
unprovoked war was manifestly illegal, waged without the sanction of the
UN and without any prior attack from Iraq†The absences of chemical and
biological weapons have only confirmed what millions around the world
have concluded, the justification for the war was nothing but a pack of
lies. According to the New York Time, Documents were forged by the Bush
Administration purporting that Iraq was trying to import Uranium from
Niger with the intention of creating false impression that Iraq has
weapons of mass destruction and is close to manufacturing nuclear bombs.
This
false allegation according to the paper was refuted by Retired
Ambassador Joseph Wilson who was asked to travel to Niger to see if this
was true and he reported that it was not. Furthermore, the U.N
Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) 18th
Quarterly Report refuted the allegation by the Bush administration that
Iraq possesses several Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) programmes that were
intended to deliver chemical and biological weapons, and concluded that
there was no evidence that Iraq developed drones. Remotely Piloted
Vehicles (R.P.V.s) and (U.A.V.s) of prohibited ranges or capable of
delivering chemical or biological weapons. According to the report;
These
systems were more likely intended for conventional
military Purposes such as air defence training,
data collection and Surveillance (Joseph, 2002: 4).
According to
Patrick (2004), “compounding the failure of the US to find any weapons
stockpile are declarations by leading Iraq Weapons scientist that were
in U.S custody, that Iraq’s previous chemical, biological and nuclear
Weapons programs were dismantled after 1991 Persian Gulf War, during the
regime of UNSCOM inspection†Again, the (Los Angeles Times of April 14,
2004), in its editorial gave a comprehensive on LT. Gen. Amir Saadi-
Saddam Hussein top Science Adviser who turned himself over to U.S.
forces in Baghdad on April 12. According to the report;
Lt. Gen. Amir
Saadi told 2DF- a German television network which filmed The event,
that Iraq no longer possessed any weapons of mass destruction,
Declaring, I was telling the truth, always telling the truth, never told
any Thing but the truth, and time will bear me out; you will see
(Patrick, 2003: 24).
Hans (2003), a former Chief UN Weapons inspector denounced the US led invasion of Iraq. In his words:
The
administration of US President George W. Bush must have other Reasons
to invade Iraq besides the officially pronounced purposed to Find and
destroy weapons of mass destruction, this is because the UN Weapons
inspectors I led for several years and constantly monitored Failed to
find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (Hans, 2003: 14).
According,
to Bill (2003), the UN resolutions imposing sanctions included no
reference to Iraq’s liberation; rather, they demanded that Iraqi
biological, chemical and Nuclear weapons are “removed, destroyed or
rendered harmless under the supervision of United Nations inspectors.
Expatiating on this , Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanou declared “the
decision cannot be automatic, it demands that conditions laid out in
corresponding UN Security Council resolution be fulfilled…we need to be
certain whether Iraq has weapons of mass destruction or not. “To put it
appropriately in his words:
…In the course of the month-long war, no
banned weapons were used By Iraqi forces. News reporters- both those
‘embedded’ with US Military units and those merely in bed with the
Pentagon- have Repeatedly issued breathless accounts of chemical or
biological Weapons “finds†in Iraq. These reports have invariably been
Disproved, with chemical weapons turning out to be pesticides or
Some other harmless material (Bill, 2003: 25).
On
why the Iraqi government was initially unwilling to re-admit the
inspectors back to Iraq, Scott (2002), a former Chief UN Weapons
inspector maintained that; “President Bush had reportedly authorized the
CIA to use all the means at its disposal- including U.S Military
Special Operations Forces and CIA Para-military teams to eliminate
Iraq’s Saddam Husseinâ€. According to the report, CIA is to view any such
plan as “preparation†for a larger military strike. He stated further
that, as early as 1992, the Iraqi’s viewed the teams he led inside Iraq
as threat to the safety of their President. In his words:
…The Iraq’s were concerned that my inspections were nothing
More than a front for larger efforts to eliminate their leader (Scott, 2002: 25).
Martin
(1999) added impetus to this stance when he posited that, Iraqi
officials bitterly protested the activities of UNSCOM, declaring that
its personnel were intelligence agents working for the United States,
Britain, Israel and that its activities were aimed not at weapons
monitoring, but at overthrowing the government of Iraq. According to
him,
…these charges have now been confirmed not only in American
press, but in the statements of Clinton administration officials, who
have conceded that U.S intelligence agents worked undercover at UNSCOM
and that data collected by UNSCOM was passed on to the intelligence
services. The United States, Britain and Israel (Martin, 2002: 102).
This
revelations according Martin (2002) has demonstrated that the Iraqi
government was resisting not demands for weapons inspections, but
demands that it expose the innermost working of its military and
intelligence commands to agents of its bitterest enemies, to which no
sovereign state could agree.
Consequently, Ron (2002) challenged the
Bush administration to substantiate any of its claims that Iraq
continues to pursue efforts to re-acquire its capacity to produce
chemical and biological weapons, which was dismantled and destroyed by
UN Weapons inspectors from 1991 to 1998. He concludes that, if the case
for war is to be made, it should be based on proven facts rather than
speculative rhetoric.
John (2002) observes that the Iraqi weapons
Chief- Hussein Kamel who defected from the regime in 1995 had told UN
inspectors that Iraq had destroyed its entire stockpile of chemical and
biological weapons and banned missiles as Iraq claimed. According to
him, these statements were ‘hushed’ up by the UN inspectors in order to
“bluff Saddam into disclosing still moreâ€. (John, 2002: 3).
According
to Fairness and Accuracy (2003) in Reporting (FAIR), a complete copy of
the Kamel transcripts was obtained by Glen Rangwala, the Cambridge
University analyst who had earlier revealed that Tony Blair’s
intelligence dossier was plagiarized from a student thesis.
Admittedly,
the allegation of WMD was false, but the truth still remains that
President George W. Bush of US carefully and craftily created a
strategic framework aimed at giving a wrong impression among his people
that Saddam Hussein possess WMD in order to wage a war against Iraq. In
the words of Dana and Walter (2003)
Despite the effort to focus on
Saddam’s desires and intentions, the bottom line is That Iraq did not
have either weapons stockpiles or active production Capabilities at the
time of the war (Dana, 2003: 125).
INTERNATIONAL LAW AND THE UNITED STATES NEW POLICY OF PRE-EMPTIVE ATTACK ON IRAQ
On
March 20, 2003 the United States, aided by Great Britain and Australia,
initiated a military invasion of Iraq. Both the US and UK contended
that they had sufficient legal authority to use force against Iraq
pursuant to Security Council Resolutions adopted in 1990 and 1991.
President Bush also contended that given the nature and type of threat
posed by Iraq†the US had a legal right to use force†in the exercise of
its inherent right of self- defence recognized in Article 51 of the UN
Charter. Given that the US had not previously been attacked by Iraq,
that contention raised questions about the permissible scope of the
pre-emptive use of force under international law. This section examines
the issue as it has developed in customary international law and under
the UN Charter.
Hyde (2003) posited that until recent decades
international law deemed the right to use force and even go to war to be
an essential attribute of every state as he summarized:
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ABSRACT - [ Total Page(s): 1 ]This research effort grew out of concern for the increasing use of force in settlement of disputes by the United States which has the tendency to reduce the moral stature of the UN (above all, the security council) an organization committed to the maintenance of international peace and security. It seeks to analyse the role of the United Nations security council in international conflict resolution, using tonal conflict resolution, using the UN Weapons inspection in Iraq as a case study. This re ... Continue reading---
