By Edward S. Herman and David Peterson
It was just a matter of time before members of the collapsing left enlisted in the imperial attack on the most fundamental principles of the UN Charter, and added their voices to the growing chorus of support for Western power-projection under the Responsibility to Protect doctrine (R2P) and the International Criminal Court (ICC). But this has now been done in Foreign Policy in Focus by John Feffer, Ian Williams, and David Greenberg.1 That such a rightward turn could find a home at the Institute for Policy Studies, whose biweekly bulletins still arrive under the heading “Unconventional Wisdom,” and which connects the “research and action of more than 600 scholars, advocates, and activists seeking to make the United States a more responsible global partner,” we find deeply troubling.
Chapter I of the UN Charter states: “To maintain international peace and security,” all member states shall respect the “principle of the sovereign equality” of their fellow members, “settle their international disputes by peaceful means,” and “refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”2 These principles rest on the fact that at the end of World War II, in 1945, it was understood that the greatest threat to world order was posed, not by events occurring inside single countries, whether caused by natural or human agency, and no matter how catastrophic the loss of life, but by aggressive, cross-border wars waged by states — “not only an international crime,” in the Nuremberg Judgment’s famous phrase, rendered 15 months after the UN’s founding conference in San Francisco, but the “supreme international crimediffering only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”3 Article 2(7) therefore wisely removes the temptation to intervene, with its unlimited potential for abuse by the greater powers, from even the United Nations itself: “Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.” It is not by fetishizing “national sovereignty” over human rights (though this canard has spread like a weed the past 20 years4), but by raising a barrier to aggression and its threat to human rights that the Charter organizes its world order. When purported “revolutions” in the advancement of human rights and international justice are purchased at the price of overturning this order, we ought to regard them with the utmost skepticism. Particularly when the cases in hand reveal no real difference from the past.
In reality, the UN Charter did little to impede the exercise of U.S. power from 1945 on. Instead what impeded its exercise were the military constraints that other powers placed on its capacity to act. But while the collapse of the Soviet bloc and of the Soviet Union itself (1989-1991) removed the most important of these constraints, it also removed the standard Cold War framework of propaganda for U.S. action. In his prepared remarks for the UN General Assembly’s Thematic Dialogue on the Responsibility to Protect on July 23, Noam Chomsky pointed out that the so-called “‘normative revolution’ declared by Western commentators took place in the 1990s, immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had, in earlier years, provided an automatic pretext for intervention. . . . New pretexts for intervention were needed,” Chomsky continued, “and the ‘normative revolution’ entered the stage. The natural interpretation of the timing gains support from the selectivity of application of R2P”5 — not, for example, to protect Iraqis against “sanctions of mass destruction,” not in response to the 2003 U.S.-U.K. military attack and occupation, not to defend the people in the eastern Congo against the transnational corporate networks and their local agents who “loot and plunder the country’s resources with impunity,” and not to defend the Gaza Palestinians against the Israeli military, even though Palestinians are supposedly protected under the Geneva Conventions, but to protect Kosovo Albanians against the Serbs, and Darfur’s “African” tribes against the “Arab Islamists” in Khartoum.6
Mrzine for more